Linux System Administration

An international engineering firm was deploying Oracle e-Business Suite 11i on Red Hat Linux to support their enterprise. The company was primarily a Windows shop and had no prior Linux expertise. They requested Celeritas services and advice on best practices for installation, configuration, management and training in the Linux environment.

Celeritas built six Linux servers to support this environment. On each server, the Red Hat Linux Advanced Server operating system was installed and kernel parameters were configured specific to the Oracle e-Business Suite environment.

Celeritas also configured the local and SAN storage, implemented password policies using the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM), configured Samba to provide access from Windows, created startup and shutdown scripts for various services, and scheduled jobs using the job control utility (crontab). Celeritas also installed and configured the Oracle technology stack for the e-Business Suite environment.

Ongoing system administration tasks included: downloading and installing Red Hat package updates each quarter, account management, monitoring for specific components and events and sending email notifications and pages when problems occurred, system and Oracle database backups, troubleshooting, and tuning.