Web Server Operations Review

This is a review of the Web Operations Fundamentals video on O’Reilly.

SUMMARY
I was interested to watch this video to learn the scope of web operations and compare that with my current knowledge. Overall it is a good introduction to how the internet communicates from browser to server along with network communication via command line. The video and audio quality are excellent. It starts off with non-technical terms and descriptions of operations therefore a wide audience can understand it. However, the presentation gets technical quickly so that it assumes the viewer has general knowledge of networking. Also the MySQL section seems out of scope and should be for database administrators.

Here are the specifc details you will learn in the following sections:

WEB OPERATIONS 101
by Mike Fiedler
Defining operations and their value. Objectives of the following:
Testing
Metrics
Risk
Identifying hardware dependencies

WEB FLOW
by Mike Fiedler
Explaining the technical process in web communications by HTTP.
Describing several unix commands to figure out technical details of servers and web pages.
Describing HTTP codes as server responses.

DNS
by Avlreen Vig
Describing how domain names are read from right to left by DNS (domain name servers)
Describing DNS Resource records including A, CNAME, MX, NS, SOA, TXT
Installing BIND and BIND-UTILS on CentOS using YUM.
Configuring zone files, this is where it starts to get complicated because the code displayed is verbose.

MySQL Server
by Arie Kachler
Describing relational databases with using MySQL on CentOS. Showing commands for installing and starting mysql. Suggesting using Innodb without explanation, until 2/3rds into the video with minimal detail. Goes into the basics of MySQL using command line and showing output of existing tables. Describing backups of mysql using software called Xtrabackup, then goes into replication and why you would use it.

NETWORKING
by Jan Schaumann
Overview of networking commands and usage using Terminal such as traceroute and strace. Examples are not very pragmatic therefore if you don’t have some networking experience this won’t be helpful. The text output on terminal is difficult to understand because the window is small so many lines become wrapped making the output more cryptic.
Describes differences in IPv4 and IPv6. Goes through packet transmission and getting host details from servers. Presented a good summary and commands used at the end.

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