linux-config-archive-lab

RHEL lab demonstrating foundational Linux system administration skills including configuration inspection, text processing, and secure archival of system files.

Lab Instructions

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1. Find the all occurences of the string "Listen" in etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/ and save the output to /root/web.txt.
2. Create a gzip-compressed tar archive of /etc/ named etc_vault.tar.gz in /vaults/ directory.
3. Imposed Challenge: Complete the above without using GNOME desktop environment.

Process

Step 1

• At the user login page I used Ctrl + Alt + F2 to open a new terminal window.
• Once I logged in I navigated to /etc/, only to discover that the package group I installed with RHEL didn't come with the /httpd/ folder. After some learning about Red Hat's Package Manager and the commands dnf, yum, and the difference between installing packages individually vs. in groups I installed the correct package using dnf install httpd.
• When in the /etc/httpd/conf/ directory, I grep searched for all occurences of the string "Listen" and redirected the stdout of the grep "Listen" to a new file web.txt leveraging the standard output redirection operator > in grep "Listen" > web.txt.
• Next I needed to move this text file to the /root/ folder, to accomplish this I used mv web.txt root/.

I will note that I later discovered that I could've searched for the string I needed to look for and create the web.txt file in the correct directory in a single command.

Step 1 Review

• Commands Covered:
  • su -u
  • dnf install httpd
  • grep "Listen"
  • mv answer.txt /root/
  • mv answer.txt web.txt

Step 2

• to accomplish creating a tar archive and gzip compressed folder the following commands were used sequentially:

  • tar -cf etc_vault.tar /etc/
  • gzip etc_vault.tar

• The final step of this lab can be broken down into just moving the .tar.gz file into a newly created /vaults/ directory.

  • Created a new /vaults/ directory with mkdir /vaults/
  • Move the etc_vault.tar.gz file into /vaults/ with mv etc_vault.tar.gz /vaults/