What are the canonical answers we've discovered over the years?

Question

We've created, appointed, or otherwise identified certain question/answer pairs that are the canonical answer for certain problems. A list of these problems is given in the accepted answer below.

Please:

• Post an Answer to nominate a question for inclusion. Questions explicitly posted for the purpose of creating a canonical Question/Answer can skip this.
• Delete content that has been merged into the official list. Try to keep this post neat and tidy.

Answer 1

These are the questions we have identified as Canonical:

Capacity Planning

• Generic Capacity Planning: Can you help me with my capacity planning?
• How do you do Load Testing and Capacity Planning for Databases
• How do you do Load Testing and Capacity Planning for Web Sites

Career

• Starting out: What a beginner should know/learn for sysadmin job?

Datacenter Design

• Fire Suppression: What's the best fire suppression for a server room?

Documentation

• Getting started with documentation

EMail & Spam

• Incoming:
  • Fighting Spam - What can I do as an: Email Administrator, Domain Owner, or User?
• Bystander:
  • How to stop people from using my domain to send spam?
• Outgoing:
  • What are SPF records, and how do I configure them?
  • How to send emails and avoid them being classified as spam

Hardware

• Why is Enterprise Storage so expensive?
• What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them?
• What is a Storage Area Network, and which benefits does it have over different storage solutions?

Hosting provider/server hardware shopping

• Dedicated server or Cloud Hosting?
• Use Google Apps/Cloud Services as a Domain Controller Replacement

Infrastructure Software

• What is Active Directory and how does it work?
• Can I have multiple DHCP servers on one network?

• What is Group Policy and how does it work?

  DNS
  • How long does it take for DNS records to propagate?
  • What is a glue record?
  • How to use DNS/Hostnames or Other ways to resolve to a specific IP:Port
  • Why does DNS work the way it does?

Licensing

• Can you help me with my software licensing issue?

Networking

• Not getting expected performance from 100Mbps Ethernet network
• Hairpin NAT: Loopback to public IP address in local network
• What tool do you use to monitor your servers?
• What am I looking for in a Monitoring Solution?
• How does IPv4 Subnetting Work?
• How does IPv6 subnetting work and how does it differ from IPv4 subnetting?
• How do VLANs work?

General Unix/Linux OS Stuff

• Why is Linux reporting "free" memory strangely?
• Why is my crontab not working, and how can I troubleshoot it?

Security

• How do I deal with a compromised server?
• Linux Webserver Rights: What are the best linux permissions to use for my website?
• Misbehaving users: What should I do about this user?
• Restricted Shell: How to restrict the users' shell allowing to execute shell programs
• How to convince a big boss that he does not need administrator privileges?
• Tips for Securing a LAMP Server
• How do I deal with the removal/eradication of an unknown worm on our network?
• Why is "chmod -R 777 /" destructive?

SSH

• ProxyCommand: How to configure a shortcut for an SSH connection through a SSH tunnel

Terminal Server (RDS)

• Find out the bottleneck for windows remote desktop server (Terminal server)

Uptime

• 100% uptime for a web application
• reaching 99.9999% uptime

Unix (General)

• Unix Server Partitioning & Filesystem Layout

Virtualization

• Enabling hardware virtualisation BIOS; anything to beware?

Web Servers

• mod_rewrite: Everything you wanted to know about mod_rewrite rules but were afraid to ask
• Picking the right MPM (on *NIX systems): How do I select which Apache MPM to use?
• One-click (x)AMP: Why not use a WAMP stack?, Meta: What to do with XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP questions
• IIS7: What are the differences between Websites, Directories, Virual Directories, and Applications in IIS 7?
• SNI: Multiple SSL domains on the same IP address and same port?

Windows (General)

Answer 2

List of Canonical Topics that do not have a Q/A yet or need improvement:

Career

• When does my small business need a SA
• How many users/servers/whatever should a SA be responsible for
• How do I protect my company from my IT guy?
• "Our previous specialist left, HALP?"
• Value of Certifications?

Datacenter Design

• What to look for in a server rack?
• Physical server security
• What Data Center room routine maintenance tasks should be done?

Infrastructure Software

• How is DNS related to Active Directory and what are some common configurations that I should be aware of?
• Windows AD Domain naming recommendations
  Needs Merging: What should I name my Active Directory?

Networking

• Hairpin NAT (et al)
• Find out the bottleneck for windows remote desktop server (Terminal server)
• How to set up VLAN network
• Firewall Theory
  • Depth of Defense : Several border firewalls in the same network
  • IDS/IPS?
  • DLP/ILP?
• Cabling...
  • I've inherited a rat's nest of cabling. What now?
  • How do you organise the cables in your racks?
• IPv6
  • NAT/Security
    • IPv6: the end of NAT?
    • Switch to IPv6 and get rid of NAT? Are you kidding?
  • Addressing (may roll into How does IPv6 subnetting work and how does it differ from IPv4 subnetting?)
    • How do you set up IPv6 alongside an IPv4-based NAT configuration?
    • IPv6 without nat but what about an isp change?
    • Do all IPv4 IP addresses have an IPv6 equivalent?
    • IPv6 configuration for my private network when prefix delegation is not supported by the provider?
    • What is the IPv6 equivalent to IPv4 RFC1918 addresses?
  • Tunneling
    • Teredo - how to connect to host behind NAT?
    • 6to4
    • 6RD
    • ISATAP
  • Support
    • How do IPv4 only applications work on IPv6 only hosts?
    • Are many IP addresses on a single interface a bad thing?
    • Can a global IPv6 address be NAT'd to an internal IPv4 address at a firewall-level?
    • Should I use IPv6 only or both IPv4 and IPv6 in my web server?

Web Servers

• Apache vHost
• Apache .htaccess/overrides

Enterprise Storage

Create one Question that covers "ES" topics, including questions about all this. Merge these answer into that Question (keeping them separate/complete answers).

• What is a Storage Area Network, and which benefits does it have over different storage solutions?
• What is the difference between SAN, NAS and DAS?
• Why is business-class storage so expensive?
• How should I set up my Fibre Channel (FC) network?
• Tuning iSCSI storage
• 2.5 inch drives versus 3.5 inch drives
• Reliability of ssd drives

Answer 3

In response to Why The Hostility, I wrote this for consideration as a canonical Q/A:

What are the basics of running a Web Server?