Linux Administration Handbook (2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)The first edition of Unix System Administration was a classic. The updated versions have been split into a linux-only version and the original, pan-Unix treatment (including Linux--just not as many variants of Linux as this book covers). I bought the Linux one, but now I wish I had the updated pan-Unix book. The authors' strength is their knowledge of Unix fundamentals, not the (ever-changing) details of various Linux distros. You're better off learning from them how vendor Unices are different in major ways from each other and from Linux. Finally, the authors don't seem nearly as well informed about Linux as they do about the older Unices. While their older book's advice was bulletproof, in this one they miss some important information. The most serious example is their recommendation to use 'dump' for filesystem backups, when Linux Torvalds has explicitly announced that it's not safe to use. 90% of this book is the same as the Unix book, so it's not a loss either way, but I'd recommend you get your Linux info fresh off the net, or in some other book series that's updated more frequently.

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"As this book shows, Linux systems are just as functional, secure, and reliable as their proprietary counterparts. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of thousands of Linux developers, Linux is more ready than ever for deployment at the frontlines of the real world. The authors of this book know that terrain well, and I am happy to leave you in their most capable hands."—Linus Torvalds"The most successful sysadmin book of all time—because it works!"—Rik Farrow, editor of ;login:"This book clearly explains current technology with the perspective of decades of experience in large-scale system administration. Unique and highly recommended."—Jonathan Corbet, cofounder, LWN.net"Nemeth et al. is the overall winner for Linux administration: it's intelligent, full of insights, and looks at the implementation of concepts." —Peter Salus, editorial director, Matrix.net
Since 2001, Linux Administration Handbook has been the definitive resource for every Linux® system administrator who must efficiently solve technical problems and maximize the reliability and performance of a production environment. Now, the authors have systematically updated this classic guide to address today's most important Linux distributions and most powerful new administrative tools.

The authors spell out detailed best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, web hosting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, and much more. Sysadmins will especially appreciate the thorough and up-to-date discussions of such difficult topics such as DNS, LDAP, security, and the management of IT service organizations.

Linux® Administration Handbook, Second Edition, reflects the current versions of these leading distributions:

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®
FedoraTM Core
SUSE® Linux Enterprise
Debian® GNU/Linux
Ubuntu® Linux

Sharing their war stories and hard-won insights, the authors capture the behavior of Linux systems in the real world, not just in ideal environments. They explain complex tasks in detail and illustrate these tasks with examples drawn from their extensive hands-on experience.

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Principles of Network and System Administration Review

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(More customer reviews)This work is a good one on the non-technical side of system adminsitration. It does not deal with stuff like HOW to install a system, but the WHYs, such as WHY you want to properly document your installations.
This sort of work has been needed for a long time, since "The Keys to Successful Unix System Management" went out of print. However, this work may be a bit too academic for many admins. They might find the recent "Practice of System and Network Administration" to be a bit better. If you can afford both, do so.

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Time Management for System Administrators Review

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(More customer reviews)To save everyone the trouble, I'll make the obvious joke: "I bought a book on time management, but I haven't had time to read it..."
Tom Limoncelli knows this about you. He knows a lot about you. He's encountered, and found solutions for, just about every one of the paradoxes, dilemmas, Catch-22s, and neverending Sisyphean ordeals that comprise the day-to-day challenge of being a professional system administrator. He wrote (with Christine Hogan) The Practice of System and Network Administration, which presents a thorough and practical body of knowledge for IT professionals: it describes all the things you need to do to build and run a manageable infrastructure. Now he's written an equally practical book on how to actually get those things done, and he wrote it in a way that makes it palatable for system administrators -- a famously cynical bunch when it comes to books about personal productivity. And there's a lot to be cynical about...
Here's how "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", by Stephen Covey, begins:
In more than 25 years of working with people in business,
university, and marriage and family settings, I have come in
contact with many individuals who have achieved an incredible
degree of outward success, but have found themselves struggling
with an inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and
effectiveness and for healthy, growing relationships with other
people.
Deep need for personal congruency? The only deep need I feel at the moment involves my gag reflex, and not in a good way.
In comparison, here's how Tom begins:
Wait! Before we get started, let's do something to make sure we
actually finish. I realize that as a system administrator, you
are flooded with constant interruptions. The phone rings, a
customer stops by with questions, your email reader beeps with
the arrival of a new message, and someone on Instant Messenger
is trying to raise your attention. Heck, I bet someone's
interrupted you while reading this paragraph. I'm not going to
cover how to deal with interruptions until the next chapter, and
I hope you don't take offense, but at this rate, I'm worried you
won't get that far. To mitigate this problem I'm going to share
a tip from Chapter 2, which, if you implement, will shield you
from interruptions between now and when we can deal with the
subject of interruptions properly.
This book is for system administrators.
Much of the geek community has embraced David Allen's Getting Things Done as a purely pragmatic way to, well, get things done, and Tom's book complements GTD in two ways. First, Tom describes his own personal system in the space of a couple of chapters, for those who aren't interested in drinking the GTD Kool-Aid but still need to start using a system. Second, Time Management for System Administrators is totally system-agnostic -- whether you use a PDA or index cards, just about every chapter of the book will amplify the effectiveness of your existing system. He also tells you how to get into Disneyland and ride all the rides without waiting in line, and how to minimize the time you spend walking around the video store looking for something to rent.
Anyway, I need to cut this short; I'm supposed to be packing for a trip to a weeklong conference, and my girlfriend just called to remind me that we were supposed to see a movie tonight, and -- well, you know.
Incidentally, anyone who runs computers for a living should also own, read, and re-read The Practice of System and Network Administration. Buy it now if you haven't already. Also buy it for your staff, your peers, and your boss. If you don't have time to do that now, add it to your to-do list. You do have a to-do list, don't you?

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Time is a precious commodity, especially if you're a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once.Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done.Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do?

The answer is time management. And not just any time management theory--you want Time Management for System Administrators, to be exact. With keen insights into the challenges you face as a sys admin, bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli has put together a collection of tips and techniques that will help you cultivate the time management skills you need to flourish as a system administrator.

Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user's needs.That's why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise.

Among other skills, you'll learn how to:

Manage interruptions
Eliminate timewasters
Keep an effective calendar
Develop routines for things that occur regularly
Use your brain only for what you're currently working on
Prioritize based on customer expectations
Document and automate processes for faster execution

What's more, the book doesn't confine itself to just the work environment, either.It also offers tips on how to apply these time management tools to your social life.It's the first step to a more productive, happier you.

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Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure Review

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(More customer reviews)I have found that an unscientific--albeit effective--way to gauge the success of an idea or technology is to do a search on the subject at Amazon.com and see how many returns you get. For diet, there are well over 15,000 titles. For PKI (public key infrastructure), there are exactly four.
While there are nearly 4,000 times as many books about dieting as there are books about PKI, the similarities between the two subjects are interesting. Both dieting and PKI are often difficult to do right, but when they are done correctly, the positive effects are immense.
In a nutshell, a PKI is a set of technologies that enables users of inherently insecure networks and software applications (i.e., the Internet and browsers) to exchange data and perform transactions securely and privately. In a PKI, each user has a set of cryptographic keys comprised of a public-key and a private-key. A PKI also enables the use of a digital certificate that can be used to identify items such as individual end users, host systems, organizations, and directory services. PKI is based on public key cryptography, which is the most common method used to authenticate the sender of a message, or to encrypt that message.
A PKI establishes digital trust and maintains that level of assurance. In the real world, trust is built through a complex web of social, legal, national, international, and business interactions that may take years or decades to develop. Unfortunately, that same level of trust is much harder to implement in the electronic world.
With that in mind, Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure provides a thorough technical introduction to the workings of PKI. Those wanting a less technical and more managerial approach should read PKI: Implementing & Managing E-Security by Andrew Nash.
The reason that PKI is so important is that information security is often the most fundamental need for today's businesses and e-commerce sites. There is hardly a Fortune 500 company without some type of external public connection, and given that more than 95% of the hosts on the Internet are running TCP/IP version 4 (with no inherent security), these systems are built and running on an insecure infrastructure. Such a reality is a scary thought.
The book is well organized into six sections. The first three chapters cover the basics and rudiments of security, cryptography, and PKI. Fortunately, the authors accomplish this by page 43. One of my personal gripes against many information security books is that they spend way too much time rehashing security basics, while not getting to the subject title until halfway through the book.
Section Two includes seven chapters detailing the different PKI components, protocols, architectures, and uses of digital certificates. Many of those considering PKI do not always realize that the "I" in PKI is infrastructure. Without a well-thought out and tested architecture and methodology, a PKI is nearly sure to fail. Getting the initial PKI software rolled out is often not an easy endeavor. Getting those pieces to work effectively in a distributed infrastructure takes an immense amount of planning and work. Section Two details ways to ensure that a PKI is well built, so that it does not collapse like a poorly designed building.
Chapter 12, "Policies, Procedures and PKI," is one of the most important chapters in the book, in that a PKI comprises much more than simply its underlying software. The book astutely notes that the technical mechanisms of a PKI are insufficient on their own, as they must be used in combination with a set of procedures to implement a particular corporate security policy.
The need for policy can't be over-emphasized, as it is a critical element in the effective and successful operation of a PKI. A PKI can't be effective unless it is deployed in the context of working policies that govern the use, administration, and management of certificates. In a similar vein, noted security guru Marcus Ranum defines a firewall as "the implementation of your Internet security policy. If you haven't got a security policy, you haven't got a firewall. Instead, you've got a thing that's sort of doing something, but you don't know what it's trying to do because no one has told you what it should do". So, too, with a PKI; if there are no policies to determine its appropriate use, inertia states that it will not be used properly.
Rather than being an abstract and dry guide, Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure concludes with some real-world examples of PKI rollouts. By learning how the three large PKI projects were implemented, readers can benefit from the lessons learned, so that they will not make the same (often common) mistakes.
Rather than being an abstract academic text, the authors, Russ Housley and Tim Polk, write from years of practical experience. Housley is the Chief Scientist for Spyrus, and Polk is the technical lead for PKI at NIST.
This review of mine originally appeared at ..../articles/2001/0104/0104m/0104m.htm
At a little over 300 pages, Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure is a valuable reference to the workings of PKI.

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Network Management: Principles and Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this book with great hope. I have spent the past 12 odd years of my career working on various networking protocols. But, I had never worked on network management systems. I figured I could use a good book about network management. Looking at the TOC and the author's info (the author teaches at GaTech), I figured I wouldn't go wrong if I read this book.
The author definitely covers a lot of ground. The emphasis is squarely on SNMP based systems. The author also has some decent discussion about EMS/NMS, event-correlation, commercial and open-source management systems, etc.
So, why am I giving it 2*-s? I didn't like the book because it is very hard to read. The sentences are very difficult to read and understand. You have to make a big effort to figure out what the author is saying and even then, it's not easy. I am hoping the author and the editors simplify the language of the book and update some of the content in the next edition. So, my suggestion would be: wait till the next edition if you can, else, be ready to put in a lot of time into reading this book.


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Network Management: Principles and Practice provides a balance of theoretical backgrounds and practical aspects of network management. Unlike other books that talk only about specific network technologies, Mani Subramanian lays the foundation for network management by presenting the background, the technologies, and the tools that all network managers simply must know. He does this by breaking the book down into three parts:*Part I provides a background on networking and network technologies such as hubs, routers, bridges, and switches. *Part II addresses network management architectures and protocols before moving on to discuss SNMP management, broadband management, and TMN. *Part III focuses on tools to monitor network parameters, network management applications, and solutions to manage networks and systems. Throughout the book, the author intertwines real-world examples based upon his experience in managing, engineering, and operating networks. 0201357429B04062001

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The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)Good sysadmins know the technical details. They can resurrect a dead server, understand the intricacies of sendmail or the Windows registry, and recite all of the types of DNS records by heart. They own copies of the UNIX System Administration Handbook and refer to them regularly. They are good sysadmins, and will contribute solidly at an intermediate level.
Great sysadmins know all of that and what is in this book. They are the ones who go on to become the senior sysadmins and consultants, have fabulous careers, and are respected by their bosses, co-workers, and customers.
There is much more to a technical job than simply the technical skills. Don't buy this book to learn how to run a system or you will be disappointed. Do, however, buy it to learn how to be an effective professional systems administrator.
It is also useful for a manager of sysadmins who is either non-technical, or has never been a sysadmin himself, as it is a good introduction to the issues and concerns that sysadmins need to face.
Limoncelli and Hogan cover many topics, including:
- Trouble ticket systems
- Desktops and Servers (how they're the same, differ, etc.)
- Administrative networks (why bother?)
- Requirements (gathering, tracking, etc.)
- Standards and centralization of services
- How to do debugging (not "you see this problem, do this" but rather learning the process of doing good debugging)
- Fix things once, not over and over again
- Security policies (including management and organizational issues for a variety of organizational profiles)
- Disaster Recovery (again, not how to backup data, but why you'd want to, legal issues, etc.)
- Systems Administration Ethics
- Change management and revision control
- Maintenance windows: what they are and why they're good for both you and your users
- Centralization versus Decentralization
- Helpdesks: sizing, scope, processes, escalation, etc.
- Data centers (many physical facility concerns that sysadmins don't often think of, including how to move a datacenter)
- Managing non-OS software (commercial and free)
They will help you answer questions like
- Does server hardware really cost more? Do we go with a few expensive servers or many cheap ones?
- What does "redundancy" actually mean?
- Why would we spend money on backups? There's never been an outage...
- What do I do when asked to do something illegal?
- How do I communicate and schedule large system changes?
- How do I do a safe server upgrade?
- They want to decentralize the sysadmin group -- what do we do?
- How do we move our datacenter?
- What sort of policy issues are there with email?
- How do I deal with my customers abusing printers?
- What do we have to worry about if we're implementing remote access (e.g. dialup modem banks) for our users?
Finally, they close with an entire section on Management:
- How to deal with cost centers, management chains, hiring, customer support, and outsourcing.
- How to manage your customers perceptions and your team's visibility
- How to manage your own happiness (time management, communication, professional development, managing your manager, etc.)
- How to be a technical manager, how to work with non-technical managers, manage your own career growth, etc.
- How to hire good sysadmins, recruiting, interviewing, soft skills, technical skills, employee retention, etc.
- The special concerns around how to fire sysadmins (often problematic, given their higher level of access)
They even have a chapter for non-technical managers who are in charge of sysadmins (this entire book would be very useful to give to a non-technical manager who doesn't really 'get it'.)
The book closes with three appendixes:
A. The Many Role of a System Administrator
B. What to Do When...
C. Acronyms
Appendix B is particularly useful, answering a wide variety of questions with solid, practical answers.
The skills and concepts in this book are the make-or-break in many careers. They turn you from just another sysadmin into a star performer, sensitive to your customers and the business, able to interact with a wide spectrum of people.

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