Best Practices
 

I have been looking on the internet for "best practices" regarding setting up a linux environment but unable to find good info.

Does anyone have suggestions where to look? Regarding clustering, GFS2, RHEL 5.x, hardware, software or really anything that may be helpful?

Ever tried searching docs.redhat.com? See http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Re...ion/index.html, http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Re...nux/index.html or http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Re...m_2/index.html ?


RHEL maintains a HCL at http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/ and ours is at http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/search.php


Software that comes with the licensed distribution you get from the official repo mirrors. Software you buy you get from the vendor. Anything else? ;-p


Best ask specific questions. I'll contribute:
http://www.sans.org/score/checklists/linuxchecklist.pdf
http://www.puschitz.com/SecuringLinux.shtml
http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/file...ning-rhel5.pdf
http://benchmarks.cisecurity.org/too...ark_v1.1.2.pdf
and the first paragraph of http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...7/#post4495856

Those links were all very helpful... I am still looking for something more generic.. like tells me a standard partitioning guide or mounting guide. Standard file structure, standard hardware set up... i keep hearing "it depends" but isnt their a standard for servers?

Not really, people say "it depends" because it depends. It depends on the hardware specs of the server, what you're going to do with the server, how many users there will be, how often you plan on updating it or upgrading to a new OS, etc. There is no standard, there are only individual preferences.

Personally, I only use server-grade backend hardware (server mobo, server chassis/PS, ECC or ECC/Registered RAM, etc). Dual core or higher Xeon, 8+ GB RAM, solid state drive around 40-80GB, and a RAID (type and capacity depends on what I'll be doing with the server, usually either RAID 1, RAID 10, or RAID 6, in order from lowest to highest capacity/speed requirements). I usually do software RAID for 1 and 10, hardware RAID for 6. I set up a 1GB /boot partition on the SSD, and use the rest for /. I set up swap and /home on the RAID, then do the standard RAID tweaks and SSD tweaks (moving /tmp to RAM (tmpfs), changing I/O scheduler, etc). Most server mobos have two NICs, so I usually bond them for redundancy, etc.

But that's just me.

Because it's FOSS, there's no fixed std, but you could start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesy...archy_Standard and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base.
It really does depend; Linux is avail on everything from phones to supercomputers ....

We could be more specific if you tell us what you're going to use the system for and how many disks you have...