Chapter 11Troubleshooting

TROUBLESHOOTING IS A TOPIC that is near and dear to me. While there are many other areas of system administration that I enjoy, I don’t think anything compares to the excitement of tracking down the root cause of an obscure problem. Good troubleshooting is a combination of Sherlock Holmes–style detective work, intuition, and a little luck. You might even argue that some people have a knack for troubleshooting while others struggle with it, but in my mind it’s something that all sysadmins get better at the more problems they run into.

While this chapter discusses troubleshooting, there are a number of common problems that can cause your Ubuntu system to not boot or to run in an incomplete state. I have moved all of these ...

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