Description:
While many books in this series are plodding, multi-author tomes to which editors add tons of ancillary information, Unix System Administrator's Bible is the exception. If you've just been assigned Unix administration duties and have little knowledge of the operating system, this book will get you up to speed quickly. Authors LePage and Iarrera begin with a quick overview of key system-administration commands, then get into some conceptual information about how various elements (hardware, kernel, etc.) combine to form a Unix system. They pay a lot of attention to networking and include intelligent documentation on the security risks involved in putting a Unix machine on a network. This book really excels in its coverage of the "soft" (but hardly unimportant) aspects of administration. How do you plan a file system for an academic environment, as opposed to a transaction-intensive business environment? What kind of backup policy do you need? Clearly, much of the real-life information here derives from LePage's experiences as a system administrator at McGill University and Iarrera's experiences in his consulting business. For example, a story about tracking down and solving a POP server performance problem is not only informative, but as much of a page turner as any mystery novel. The complete BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) 2.2.5, with source, appears on the companion CD-ROM. --David Wall
| 
