Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two

Preface

Both authors of this book have been system administrators for a while. When the opportunity to write this book came about, we initially focused on cool hacks we'd developed or used in our server and system administration careers. We also asked friends, who asked their friends, and we were therefore able to get some great contributions from others to augment the things that we'd come up with. Everybody has problems they like to solve. Bill likes distributed authentication, undeleting and recovering files, and tweaking filesystems in general. Brian likes making admin tasks more efficient, reliable, and repeatable; has a bucketload of cool scripts to do various tasks; and loves getting and using data from remote sources. And every sysadmin has favorite techniques for solving problems, so Hack is to Hacker as Cool Tip or Technique is to Server or System Administrator. Sysadmin hacks are essentially clever ways of approaching whatever problem you're trying to solve, whether it's figuring out how to recover lost data, trying to collect information from distributed clients in one place so that you can easily see the big picture or anything else that comes up.

As we worked on this book, thinking about cool server and sysadmin hacks mutated into thinking about general tips and tricks that we found useful to simplify our lives as system administrators. We also noticed that there weren't really any books available along the lines of "Things We Wish Previous System Administrators Had ...