linux-sysadmin

A guide to operating and securing Linux servers, including remote access, services, users, permissions, packages, networking, firewalls, logs, and system resources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to configure a Linux host, secure SSH, create systemd services, manage users and packages, set up a firewall, or investigate slow servers, blocked ports, and failed services.
Why use it?
Server problems often involve many low-level settings, and unsafe changes can cause outages or lock you out. This guide provides procedures for checking, configuring, and hardening the machine.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kouroshez/coding-os/linux-sysadmin
Any agent
npx skills add kouroshez/coding-os --skill linux-sysadmin
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kouroshez/coding-os

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 171 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,550 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 3 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00171 $0.01550
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.00775
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00310
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00155

Measured yesterday against content hash 33c637b3c09c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

linux-sysadmin scanned grade B with 3 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/triage.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootlowPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

- `curl … | sudo bash` from an unverified source → read it first.

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

Downloads and executes remote codemediumSupply chain

curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.

- `curl … | sudo bash` from an unverified source → read it first.

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- `curl … | sudo bash` from an unverified source → read it first.
src/core/skills/linux-sysadmin/SKILL.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Linux System Administration

A server is a contract with production: it stays up, it's reachable only how you intend, and when it misbehaves you can see why in one pass. This skill is host-level operation + hardening. Containers and pipelines belong to deployment-cicd; the incident process to incident-response; this is the box itself.

Triage a host in one compact report (disk, mem, load, failed units, ports): bash scripts/triage.sh --json

SSH — the front door, hardened

# /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/10-hardening.conf  (drop-in, survives package upgrades)
PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no            # keys only — the single biggest win
PubkeyAuthentication yes
KbdInteractiveAuthentication no
MaxAuthTries 3
AllowUsers deploy                    # allow-list, not everyone
# Wrong — edits the main file, lost on upgrade, no syntax check before reload
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config && systemctl restart sshd     # locks you out if typo'd

# Correct — drop-in + validate + reload (keeps your current session alive)
sshd -t && systemctl reload sshd                       # -t aborts on bad config

Keys not passwords, root login off, an AllowUsers allow-list, fail2ban for brute-force. Never restart sshd before sshd -t passes — a typo + restart locks you out of a remote box. Full hardening → references/ssh-hardening.md.

systemd — services that restart themselves

# /etc/systemd/system/api.service
[Unit]
Description=API service
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/api --port 8080
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2
User=api                             # never run a service as root
NoNewPrivileges=true                 # cheap hardening
ProtectSystem=strict                 # read-only /usr, /boot, /etc

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

systemctl daemon-reload after editing a unit, then enable --now. Read failures with systemctl status api + journalctl -u api -e --no-pager. A service with no Restart= dies silently on the first crash. Recipes → references/systemd-and-services.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 116 lines · 171 tokens per session scan B 33c637b3c09c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

linux-sysadmin is a skill published in the GitHub repository kouroshez/coding-os (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 171 tokens to every session and 1,550 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 3 findings (asks for root, downloads and executes remote code, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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