Was wondering, what maintenance is necessary to keep Linux running well and for longer periods without a fresh installation. I know defragmenting, antivirus and spyware scans arent necessary. Tweaking startup memory programs and services doesnt seem necessary. I dont really see options for removing useless files such as temp files and folders. Is the answer really nothing? Or are there things that can be done once a person knows more about linux?

Apart from emptying out my /tmp directory and occasionally getting rid of files I no longer use in my home directory, I do very little housekeeping because I don't find it necessary. I do occasionally check /var/log/messages for any attempts at illegal accesses to my computer, but I only got that when my PC was the DMZ on my network.

Hi,
It depends a bit of your distro, in Debian, there are very useful tools to get rid of unwanted / useless

files/libraries called "orphaned" (now isn't it a meaningful word !). /tmp needs a bit of your attention, as well,

as Komakino rightly said.

Cheers

Just clean out /tmp once in a while. Unlike that other OS, Linux is designed to be low maint.

Doesn't your system automatically clean it out?

Any way you should back up your sytem every so often. A simple tar/bzip2 or gunzip combo is usually enough

Oh, and when you become comfortable you could try updating your Kernel too.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Ageless
[B]Was wondering, what maintenance is necessary to keep Linux running well and for longer periods without a fresh installation. ]

I run Mandrake and that has some built in cron jobs which do clean ups. I don't know what distro you are using. If it is Mandrake someone on the newbie list would help with the scripts, if you don't get the info here. Look in /etc/cron.daily
by using cd into it and then ls -al. See below, and this will tell you what jobs are being done, if any. Also if you google cron or cron.daily I think you would get information on what it can do, and how to do it.

[rosemary@localhost ~]$ cd /etc/cron.daily
[rosemary@localhost cron.daily]$ ls -al
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 22 10:37 ./
drwxr-xr-x 74 root root 4096 Apr 29 11:55 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 180 Mar 14 21:30 logrotate*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 402 Feb 9 04:01 makewhatis.cron*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Apr 22 08:41 msec -> /usr/share/msec/security.sh*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 104 Mar 11 02:07 rpm*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 314 Jan 10 18:07 tmpwatch*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 90 Apr 22 10:37 virusscan.sh*

Maybe take a look at this link for some information ...

http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/ne...ix/cron-1.html

HTHs silverbirch

Probably the most important thing, IMHO, is to subscribe to the 'security announce' mailing list for your distro and apply patches/install updated packages as required. Most distros have automated tools to do this.

No it doesn't. I don't run a lot of automatic tools, I prefer to maintain my system manually.