# Documents for system administrators

This page contains some links to documents that are of use for system administrators. Not all of the documents are necessarily installed.

Sysadmins should look especially at manual page section 8. The LDP books Network Administrators' Guide and System Administrators' Guide (draft) are important.

## Software installation

The Debian package management tools are dselect, and dpkg. With them, it is quite simple to install, upgrade, and uninstall programs.

For programs installed from source, you usually need to use make or imake. You may need some programming skills to compile some programs, if they haven't been ported to Linux already. Read the README or other documentation for each package for closer details.

## Backups and archives

Traditional tools for making backups are tar, cpio, and dump. Also available for Debian are afio, tob, and taper. These tools can also be used for archiving. They're mostly intended for tape drives.

## User administration

Users are created with adduser, groups with addgroup. There are currently no good tools for removing either, you have to edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group by hand.

In Debian, each user `foo' has his own group `foo'. Most other Unix systems are different. You may want to read the reason for this.

This page is part of dwww.