How I learned to manage processes and mount persistent storage in Linux.
By Dasari Jayanth | 2nd Year B.Sc. Computer Science & Cloud Computing
As I continue my journey toward becoming a Cloud and DevOps Engineer, I've realized that understanding the underlying operating system is non-negotiable. Today, I took a deep dive into Linux system administration, focusing on three critical areas: Process Management, System Monitoring, and Disk Management.
Here is a breakdown of what I learned and the commands I used.
- Process Management ⚙️ Understanding how software runs on a server is crucial. In Linux, everything is a process. I learned how to view, manage, and terminate processes directly from the terminal. Viewing Processes The most basic command I used was ps (Process Status). ps: Shows processes running in the current shell.
ps aux: The holy grail command. It shows all running processes from all users.
Managing Processes
Sometimes a process hangs or consumes too much memory. I learned how to stop them gracefully or forcefully.
kill : Sends a signal to terminate the process with the specific Process ID (PID).
kill -9 : Forcefully kills the process (use with caution!).
- System Monitoring 📊 As a future Cloud Engineer, knowing the health of your server is key. I explored tools to monitor CPU, memory, and disk usage in real-time. top: Displays real-time system processes, CPU load, and memory usage.
htop: A more user-friendly, colorful version of top that allows scrolling and easier process management.
df -h: "Disk Free" - shows available disk space in a human-readable format (GB/MB).
free -h: Shows used and free RAM.
- Disk Management: Adding & Mounting Storage 💾 This was the most hands-on part of my day. In the cloud (like AWS EC2), you often need to add extra storage volumes (EBS) to your instances. I learned how to attach, format, and mount a raw disk to a Linux system manually. Here is the step-by-step workflow I followed: Step 1: List Block Devices First, I checked the available disks attached to the system. Bash lsblk I identified the new disk (e.g., /dev/xvdf or /dev/sdb) that was attached but not yet mounted. Step 2: Partitioning the Disk I used fdisk to create a partition on the raw disk. Bash sudo fdisk /dev/xvdf Typed n for a new partition.
Selected p for primary.
Pressed Enter for defaults (using the full disk).
Typed w to write the changes.
Step 3: Formatting the Filesystem
Before Linux can store files, the partition needs a filesystem (like NTFS in Windows, but usually ext4 or xfs in Linux).
Bash
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf1
Step 4: Mounting the Disk
I created a directory to serve as the mount point and attached the partition to it.
Bash
sudo mkdir /mnt/mydrive
sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt/mydrive
ow, any file I save to /mnt/mydrive is physically stored on the new disk!
Conclusion 🚀
Mastering these Linux fundamentals gives me the confidence to handle cloud infrastructure more effectively. Knowing how to mount volumes and manage runaway processes is essential when debugging servers in a production environment.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dasari-jayanth-b32ab9367/
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