- Front Matter
- The SEV-1 Triage Card
- Who This Book Is For
- The Safety Rule
- Part I: The Incident Playbooks
- Chapter 1: The 10-Minute Stabilization Loop
- Chapter 2: Disk Full: Reclaim Space without Deleting Evidence
- Chapter 3: Service Won't Start: Read the Real Failure Reason in 60s
- Chapter 4: High CPU and Mystery Load: Isolate the Offender
- Chapter 5: OOMKilled: Separate Real Memory Pressure from Cache Confusion
- Chapter 6: Network Failures: Refused, Timeout, DNS, and TLS
- Chapter 7: Permission Denied: Fix It Without chmod 777
- Chapter 8: Suspected Compromise: Contain, Preserve, Escalate
- Part II: The On-Call Baseline
- Chapter 9: Safe File Operations in Production
- Chapter 10: Triage Gigabyte Logs in Seconds
- Chapter 11: Wrangling Log Data with awk, sed, and jq
- Chapter 12: Safe Configuration Deployments
- Part III: Access & Cloud Infrastructure
- Chapter 13: Fleet SSH Configurations
- Chapter 14: Safe sudo Configurations
- Chapter 15: Cloud IAM Debugging (AWS/GCP)
- Chapter 16: When the Instance Won't Boot
- Chapter 17: Resizing Volumes Online
- Chapter 18: Troubleshooting Cloud VPC Networking
- Part V: Containers & Kubernetes
- Chapter 19: Debugging Containers from the Node
- Chapter 20: Kubernetes On-Call: CrashLoopBackOff & Evictions
- Part VI: Automation & eBPF Performance
- Chapter 21: Production-Safe Bash Scripting
- Chapter 22: Idempotent Systems & Automation
- Chapter 23: Incident Scheduling and Cron Failures
- Chapter 24: Proving the Performance Bottleneck
- Chapter 25: The eBPF Field Toolkit: bpftrace One-Liners
- Appendices
- Appendix A: Print-Ready One-Page Cheat Sheets
- Appendix B: Danger-Zone Commands & Safe Alternatives
- Appendix C: Cross-Distro Cheat Sheet
- Appendix D: Recovery When SSH Is Broken
THE LINUX FIELD MANUAL: Diagnose and fix production incidents — fast
> 3:07 a.m. The pager goes off. Your database is down, the disk is full, and you're the on-call engineer holding the line. Open this manual to the playbook you need right now to diagnose, stabilize, and verify the fix -- fast.
Minimum price
$9.99
$19.99
You pay
Author earns
PDF
EPUB
About
About the Book
3:07 a.m. The pager goes off.
The database is down, the disk is full, and you are the on-call engineer holding the line.
Most Linux books focus on command syntax, operating system theory, and administrative history. They are designed for classroom study or general lookup.
This book is different. It is designed for incidents.
The Linux Field Manual is a focused runbook covering the production failures that cause almost every on-call page. Each incident is structured as a clear, step-by-step playbook:
- The Page Arrives — Decipher the alert in the language SREs actually use.
- Classify — Walk down the 60-second diagnosis ladder before changing anything.
- Diagnose — Pinpoint the failure boundary (service, port, resource, or dependency).
- Stabilize — Apply safe, non-destructive temporary workarounds.
- Verify — Complete the checklist to confirm the fix is active.
- The SEV-1 Triage Card: A 2-minute decision tree to classify outages on any minimal Linux box.
- 8 Complete Playbooks: Step-by-step triage flows for Disk Full, Service Down, High CPU/Load, OOMKilled, Network Failures, Permission Errors, and Suspected Compromise.
- Cloud & Containers: Debugging instances that won't boot, cloud IAM issues, VPC DNS failures, and node-level container namespace troubleshooting.
- Automation & eBPF: Write idempotent scripts, scheduled cron jobs that fail loudly, and copy-paste
bpftraceone-liners. - Safety-First Commands: Every dangerous command is paired with a safe alternative and a validation step to prevent you from causing the next incident.
- Who it is for: DevOps engineers, SREs, systems administrators, and platform developers who carry a pager and work in terminals.
- No academic filler: Every command is verified on real CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian systems.
- Prerequisites: Assumes basic shell familiarity (
ssh,cd,ls,grep). This is not an introduction to Linux or an exam study guide.
Author
About the Author
mohammad zeya ahmad
Software Engineer And Author
Contents
Table of Contents
Get the free Community Edition
You can get the free Community Edition in PDF or EPUB just by sharing your name and email address with the author, or you can just click this link to read a shorter sample online...
The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms...
Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase
We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.
(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)
In fact, authors have earned over $15 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Write and Publish on Leanpub
You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!
Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.
Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.