The first time you sign into developerWorks, a profile is created for you. Select information in your profile (name, country/region, and company) is displayed to the public and will accompany any content you post. You may update your IBM account at any time.

All information submitted is secure.

The first time you sign in to developerWorks, a profile is created for you, so you need to choose a display name. Your display name accompanies the content you post on developerworks.

Please choose a display name between 3-31 characters. Your display name must be unique in the developerWorks community and should not be your email address for privacy reasons.

All information submitted is secure.

My developerWorks:

My notifications:

Sign out

Select a language:

Tuning Red Hat for maximum performance

Why and how to tune a stock installation

Tom Syroid (dwcomments@syroidmanor.com), Freelance author, Studio B Productions

Tom Syroid is a contract writer for Studio B Productions, a literary agency based in Indianapolis, IN, specializing in computer-oriented publications. His specialties include *NIX system security, Samba, Apache, and Web database applications based on PHP and MySQL. He has experience administering and maintaining a diverse range of operating systems including Linux (Red Hat, OpenLinux, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo), Windows (95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP), and AIX (4.3.3 and 5.1). He is also the co-author of Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell (O'Reilly & Associates) and OpenLinux Secrets (Hungry Minds). Tom lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with his wife and two children. Hobbies include breaking perfectly good computer installations and then figuring out how to fix them, along with gardening, reading, and building complex structures out of Legos with his kids. Contact Tom at dwcomments@syroidmanor.com.

Summary: This tutorial details the ins and outs of transforming a stock, "out-of-the-box" Red Hat installation into a finely tuned, stable system customized to individual needs and tastes. The material presented here is based on Red Hat 7.3, although many of the techniques and procedures discussed are equally applicable to other mainstream Linux® distributions. And while the title says tuning for performance, you'll soon discover that performance and security often go hand in hand.

Date: 21 Aug 2002
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (77 KB | 20 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 17757 views
Comments:

Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial shows you how to transform a stock, "out of the box" Red Hat installation into a finely tuned, stable system customized to your needs and tastes. Topics addressed include:

Installation issues
Culling, updating, and maintaining installed packages
System services administration, hard-drive tuning, and increasing network performance
Compiling a custom kernel

This tutorial is written for Linux server administrators who want to customize Linux to increase the performance and reliability of an installation.

Prerequisites

You should have a basic understanding of common UNIX® administrative concepts and tasks, such as file system layout, daemons and services, editing configuration files, the Linux initialization process, and networking.

To follow along with the examples, you should have a pre-existing Linux installation, or a system with enough available free drive space to install a rudimentary Linux distribution. As noted, while this tutorial is based on Red Hat 7.3, the concepts discussed are applicable to a wide range of other Linux products.

Comments