Book Review:Essential System Administration

Rick Franchuk has written a review of Essential System Administration. As would seem apprent, the book covers (surprise!) Administration ranging from automating activities, maintenance to essential services. Click below for more info.

This is the second book review for Slashdot in my Path To Guru series. In retrospect, I should have reviewed this book first, but I wanted to get the latest edition and read through it to see what new stuff is in.

I'm reluctant to give ANY book a 10 out of 10 rating, but if there is any book in existence that deserves such, this is it. Every major aspect of Unix administration is covered in a concise and easy-to-digest format.

REVIEW:	Essential System Administration
Æleen Frisch
(O'Reilly & Associates ISBN 1-56592-127-5)

Nutshell Review:	The name says it all... this book should be on the shopping list, on the shelf, or in the hand of anyone maintaining Unix boxen. Rating: 10/10

Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting

What's Good?

When I started dealing with serious administration issues, this book saved my bacon more times than I care to count. Nearly every facet of administration is covered, from the lowliest maintenance task (like emptying log files) through the essential services (DNS, Telnet, FTP, etc) up to an introduction of automating tasks using shell scripts and Perl. The author takes great pains to detail parallels between OS variants (which usually falls into a BSD way vs. SVR way arrangement), so the book can be used by virtually anyone in any *nix-ish environment.

Issues beyond that of purely technical matters are discussed as well. Æleen reveals some of the basic facts about being a Systems Administrator in a often comical, sometimes brutally honest, fashion. Real Life® examples of how certain situations were handled (or could have been handled better) to achieve the best results in the Admin->User interface are liberally sprinkled throughout.

What's Bad?

It's not easy to find any MAJOR faults in this particular text (hence the 10 of 10 rating), but there are a couple of minor annoyances.

Like all computer texts, this one too suffers from becoming quickly outdated. For most of the material, age isn't much of problem (chmod does the same thing it has done for quite some time), but specialized administration tools for your OS may have undergone major revisions since the release of ESA.

While the book gives you enough information to hold your own in most normal and many unusual/problem situations, it can't provide all information about everything. It operates best as a foundation text, supporting more detailed information in tomes written to cover specific topics. For example, ESA covers the use of sendmail in a short chapter about electronic mail services which can get you up and running, get aliases and forwardings going, etc. For serious sendmail work though, you'll need to consult a more complete writing on the subject (ORA's sendmail).

There's also a bit of overlap between this book and Practical Unix and Internet Security, my first review. While I personally don't find this so much of a problem (security should be on the mind of any good administrator), some people may resent feeling like they're paying twice for the same information.

What's In It For Me?

At the risk of repeating myself, buy this book. if you plan on doing anything more interesting on a *nix box than checking your E-mail. Even SiteOp veterans can get use from it if they suddenly find themselves administering another environment... I've recently taken on some Solaris boxes, and ESA has been most helpful to me in finding Sun equivalents to BSD tools.

Æleen offers advice to the newless clewbie administrator on the subtle power games involved in maintaining machines other people rely on to get work done. It's an odd sensation having suits twice your age act nervous around you, for fear of saying something that could upset you and suddenly make their quarterly report vanish (hmmm... what does 'rm -rf /home/blake' do? Whoops!) More often than not, interpersonal communication is the most important aspect of any Admin's job. Happy co-workers and management are also more likely to 'forgive and forget' when you perform the inevitable catastrophic fuck-up.

Wishful Thinking

I strongly believe every administrator should read this book... in order to facilitate that, I wrote an e-mail to Tim O'Reilly (the OR in ORA), asking him to HTMLize it and release it under GPA. I haven't received any response yet, but it has only been a couple of days and I'd expect he has a great many things to do with his time.

At present, I'm hoping he'll agree, but I expect that nothing will come of it. ORA deserves to make money, and ESA is almost certainly bringing in a substantial profit. There's a history of ORA releasing some of their work under GPA though, so you never know... I'll do a followup when I get a definitive answer one way or the other. Please don't start mail-bombing him (or me! ;) about it.

Purchase the book over here at Amazon.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction to System Administration
2. The UNIX Way
3. Essential Administrative Tools
4. Startup and Shutdown
5. User Accounts
6. Security
7. Managing System Resources
8. Automating Tasks with Scripts and Such
9. Filesystems and Disks
10. Backup and Restore
11. Terminals and Modems
12. Printers and the Spooling Subsystem
13. TCP/IP Network Management
14. Electronic Mail
15. Configuring and Building Kernels
16. Accounting

Afterward: Don't Forget to Have Fun
Appendix A: Bourne Shell Programming
Appendix B: Selecting and Installing Linux Systems
Bibliography