Book Review: Essential System Administration

crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2024 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

USA Linux Users Group
Book Review
Reviewer: Geeshock

Book: Essential System Administration
Author: AEleen Frisch

Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 1176
ISBN: 0-596-00343-9
Edition: 3rd Edition August 2024
Intended Audience: Systems Administrators

The Book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/
Sample Chapter: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/chapter/ch11.pdf

Essential System Administration covers basic sys admin so as one might
expect it covers a wide range of topics. This book is intended for those
that already have a grasp of working on the command line, reading man
pages, and experimenting around with the system. With the range of
topics that cover administration one can't expect one book to cover them
all so this book covers the topics most common and allows you to build
from there.

The first few chapters cover some of the basics. It tries to get you to
think like an administrator. It compares the sys admin of 30 years ago
compared to what that same admin would do today and very little has
actually changed. Another side most don't see is the customer service
skills. The little armadillo on the cover is quite appropriate as a sys
admin usually has to remain quite thick skinned, especially when 4 pm rolls
around and about 100 ppl are trying to print 100 pages of reports to the
only printer in the office before quiting time. Chapter 3 covers some
basic admin tools and piping them together to fine tune the output.
Also it covers some basic stuff about the syslogs and the cron tools.

The next chapter covers the boot scripts. Even though the names and
duties of the boot scripts depends on the flavor you run, they all
follow a pretty standard pattern and should be easy enough to follow once
you've had some practice reading them. Also this chapter covers
customizing them to better suit your needs as an administrator.

Other chapters cover items such as user/group management, LDAP,
Security,DNS, SNMP(Simple Network Management Protocol), Managing disks
and partitions, Serial lines, printers and print servers, Automating
repetitious tasks through creating scripts and programs. Compiling
kernels for BSD and Linux, and system accounting.

This book covers a wide range of topics and even though it can't cover
them as throughly as a book specializing on that subject it is a must
have for anyone wishing to, or dealing with Unix administration.

_________________
Veronica - Arch Linux 64-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Archie/Jughead - Arch Linux 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Betty/Reggie - Arch Linux (VBox) 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
BumbleBee - OpenSolaris-SunOS 5.11

richard · Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2024 5:06 am Post subject:

Thanks crouse. I think that this could be one for the bookshelf.

_________________
Windows Vista / Ubuntu 8.10

crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2024 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

Thank geeshock..... I just posted it, I didn't write it Wink

_________________
Veronica - Arch Linux 64-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Archie/Jughead - Arch Linux 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Betty/Reggie - Arch Linux (VBox) 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
BumbleBee - OpenSolaris-SunOS 5.11

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