LPIC-2 201-450: System Maintenance study guide

System Maintenance covers building and installing software from source, designing backups that restore correctly, rotating logs, and notifying users about maintenance.

Source, backup and logs

A typical source build is ./configure --prefix=/usr/local, make, make install. Use --help to see options and DESTDIR to stage files for packaging instead of writing directly to the live root.
tar -czf, rsync -aAX, dd, and cpio serve different backup needs. rsync preserves ownership, ACLs and xattrs with -aAX; trailing slashes change whether the source directory itself is copied.
Test restores, not only backups. A backup on the same disk is not protection against disk failure.
logrotate reads /etc/logrotate.conf and /etc/logrotate.d/; test with logrotate -d before relying on a new rule.
Notify users with wall, /etc/motd, or a scheduled shutdown +10 'message'.

Worked example

Back up /srv nightly to /backup/srv while preserving metadata. Run rsync -aAX --delete /srv/ /backup/srv/ after a --dry-run. Reasoning: -a recurses and preserves times, symlinks and permissions; -A preserves ACLs; -X preserves xattrs. The trailing slash on /srv/ copies its contents into /backup/srv/; without it, the result would be /backup/srv/srv/. --delete removes files at the destination that no longer exist at the source, so dry-run first.

Traps

Running make install without a prefix and overwriting distribution files.
Misreading rsync's trailing-slash behavior.
Rotating logs with wrong ownership or permissions.
Never testing a restore.