Linux System Administration

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Linux System Administration

By Tom Adelstein, Bill Lubanovic
First Edition March 2007
Pages: 296
ISBN 10: 0-596-00952-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596009526
(Average of 7 Customer Reviews)

Book description

For experienced system administrators looking to acquire Linux skills, and seasoned Linux users facing a new challenge, this book offers practical knowledge for managing a complete range of Linux systems and servers. It summarizes the steps you need to build everything from standalone SOHO hubs, web servers, and LAN servers to load balanced clusters and servers consolidated through virtualization. You'll also learn to back up data and create shell scripts.

Full Description

If you're an experienced system administrator looking to acquire Linux skills, or a seasoned Linux user facing a new challenge, Linux System Administration offers practical knowledge for managing a complete range of Linux systems and servers. The book summarizes the steps you need to build everything from standalone SOHO hubs, web servers, and LAN servers to load-balanced clusters and servers consolidated through virtualization. Along the way, you'll learn about all of the tools you need to set up and maintain these working environments.

Linux is now a standard corporate platform with users numbering in the hundreds of millions, and there is a definite shortage of talented administrators. Linux System Administration is ideal as an introduction to Linux for Unix veterans, MCSEs, and mainframe administrators, and as an advanced (and refresher) guide for existing Linux administrators who will want to jump into the middle of the book. Inside, you'll learn how to:

Set up a stand-alone Linux server

Install, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot a DNS server using BIND

Build an Internet server to manage sites, perform email and file transfers, and more

Set up an email service for a small-to-medium-sized site, complete with authentication

Install and configure Apache, PHP, and MySQL on a web server built from scratch

Combine computers into a load-balanced Apache web server cluster based on the free Linux Virtual Server

Set up local network services from distributed file systems to DHCP services, gateway services, print services, user management and more

Use Linux virtualization with Xen or VMWare to run multiple kernels on one piece of hardware; manage each kernel's access to processor time, devices, and memory

Create shell scripts and adapt them for your own needs

Back up and restore data with rsync, tar, cdrecord, Amanda, and MySQL tools

Linux System Administration is not only knowledgeable and practical, but convenient. The ingredients for this book had been scattered throughout mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups, as well as books, periodicals, and the experiences of colleagues. Everything is now in one handy guide. In the course of their research, the authors also solved many problems whose solutions were completely undocumented. They now pass their lessons on to you.

Browse within this book

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Featured customer reviews

Could be better, January 31 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Anonymous Reader [Respond | View]

I agree with Mathew, the chroot environment the book leads the reader to create effectively broke my DNS server. I am stuck on chapter 2 trying to sort out how and if I can get around it. I think it has something to do with the permissions settings...

Could be better, December 16 2007

Rating:

Submitted by Mathew [Respond | View]

This book gave me a lot of confusion.

For starters, running a net install of Sarge which, I'm guessing because they never say, is the version used by the authors led to errors right from the get-go. One of the first things it says to do after installing the multifunction server is install several packages. Two of which are not installable because they are deprecated and no longer available (libdb3++-dev and xlispstat).

Continuing, the book then goes through the steps of installing a DNS server and provides steps which assume you haven't already built your multifunction system. It could at least let you know that the multifunction server isn't even going to be used for anything.

It also indicates that the reader will be creating a chroot environment for bind to run in. Then doesn't tell the reader to issue the chroot command. I may be wrong in how chroot works but when a book tells you that you will be issuing a command it is generally expected to be listed as a command to run at some point thereafter.

So far, I haven't been able to get past the first three chapters because I've been too confused by how the damn thing has been written. I've had it for nearly three weeks now.

Good book in general, deficient in email, November 16 2007

Rating:

Submitted by Paul [Respond | View]

My only complain with this book is that it uses the same tired old excuse that has been repeated in book after book after book to ignore sendmail and cover postfix (or qmail in older books) instead.

Sendmail is insecure, sendmail allows open relaying, blah blah blah.

This book was published in March of 2007, anyone keeping abreast of technology knows that open relaying and may other flaws in sendmail have been fixed quite some time ago.

The authors may have a personal preference for postfix, but if anyone is going to write a book and call it something as definitive as "Linux Server Administration", with the caption "Solve Real-Life Linux Problems Quickly" in bold caps across the top of the cover, it had better damn well know and cover sendmail in resonable detail in a way that the average sysadmin can pick up and use quickly. Is it still the dominant MTA worldwide, and there are a lot of sysadmins who are in the position of having to maintain a server that someone else set up, so they do not have the choice, in "Real-Life" of what MTA to use and maintain at least in the short term.

Other than that, the book has proven valuable in many ways, though sometimes the chosen wording is a bit inaccurate (i.e.: p.137: the code snippet is indeed a PHP script, but it is only a CGI program if PHP is being run in CGI mode).

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It is very good!!, September 07 2007

Rating:

Submitted by leo [Respond | View]

This book is good for references (beginners,advanced users).
I have a doubt, in the page number 13, there is a ip address 70.153.258.42, in the third byte, it can not be 258 the high value allow is 255.

But there is no problem the book is great !!! you wont waste your money!!!

Decent book, May 27 2007

Rating:

Submitted by Nate [Respond | View]

I found this book to be quite good for a Windows system admin for their first few servers, and it also seems to be a good reference for those of us who have built a few already. The chapter and examples of writing scripts are quite good as well.
Each chapter has detailed examples of how to setup server programs such as postfix, although I found the section on setting up a FTP server to be severely lacking. The book also does not include setting up SpamAssassin or Amavisd for the postfix server it shows how to set up.
Overall I think that a new system admin should use this book, along with system admins who need a simple reference for the basics.

A good survey of interesting apps & technologies, May 26 2007

Rating:

Submitted by Bob Uhl [Respond | View]

've just finished reading O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux
System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer's copy).
Bottom line up front: it's a handy introduction for the beginner
GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's
bookshelf.

The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration
tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing,
high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the
chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're
enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and
headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases
the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the
material presented. I've been working with Apache for almost a decade
now, but I've not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have
played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving
with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.

I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux
'administration' books focus on GUI tools--I've seen some which don't
even bother addressing the command line! I've long said that if one
isn't intimately familiar with the shell--if one cannot get one's job
done with it--then one isn't really a sysadmin. Linux System
Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the
get-go. Kudos!

The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace
Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there's very, very little to use
Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don't.
Postfix is more stable and far more secure.

Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware;
Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and
so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux
in particular is choice--it's good to see a reference work which
implicitly acknowledges that.

The authors are also pretty good about calling out common
pitfalls--several got me, once upon a time. It'd have been nice to have
had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth...

The book's not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at
least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster
in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn't actually need to
register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these
are pretty minor quibbles.

I'd say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium
business admin who'd like to start using Linux, or who already is but
doesn't really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at
least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will
probably find some useful stuff in here.

A really good technical book, May 19 2007

Rating:

Submitted by Mark Mitchell [Respond | View]

4 out of 5 stars
Let me start off by saying this book is easy to read and understand. I really found each chapter to be modular and this enhanced the readability of the book. I think that even a novice could get a multifunctional server up and running. The step by step instructions that follow a brief overview is a basic but genius way of transitioning from each part of the initial to the final stages of the set up and configuration process. I am only half way through the project but I am eager to finish the book as I set up a fedora core 6 server for my network administration class.

The only negative thing that I can say about the manual is: I wish this book dealt with Redhat fedora instead of Debian as the operating system but that is just a minor detail.
Mark

Media reviews
"...this book is easy to read and understand. I really found each chapter to be modular and this enhanced the readability of the book. I think that even a novice could get a multifunctional server up and running. The step by step instructions that follow a brief overview is a basic but genius way of transitioning from each part of the initial to the final stages of the set up and configuration process. I am only half way through the project but I am eager to finish the book as I set up a fedora core 6 server for my network administration class."
-- Mark Mitchell

"I've just finished reading a review copy of O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux System Administration. It's a handy introduction for the beginner GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's bookshelf. The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualization. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction."
-- Bob Uhl, Slashdot.org

"Linux system administrators who want to solve problems quickly may already have many Linux references at hand for in-depth treatment, but the advantage of Linux System Administration is it's a quicker reference than most – and thus more valuable to Linux programming libraries and programmer collections than weightier coverages. Its at-a-glance pages offer up plenty of real-world case history scenarios, question/answer formats, and tips which advance the training of existing Linux administrators who want to enhance and expand on their skills. From installing Apache and MySQL on a web server to using Linux visualization with VMW are to run multiple kernels on one piece of hardware, this is an item of choice for any Linux programmer."
-- Diane Donovan, California Bookwatch - Computer Shelf

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