Linux System Administration

ix

Preface

As Bill Lubanovic and I were putting the final touches on this book, I overheard a

conversation between two coworkers in our Cisco lab discussing Linux. The senior

networking guru of the two made an interesting remark. He said that despite all his

knowledge, he felt incomplete as a professional because he had never learned Linux.

A moment later he and the other gentleman turned to me and looked me square in

the eyes. I smiled and went on working.

That evening, our director of Information Technology made an offhand remark to

me during a conference that struck me as unusual. He said that he wanted to learn

Apache, and when I asked him why he replied, “I just want to learn it,” and left it at

that.

Later in the conference, our director requested feedback from the group on a solu-

tion for patch management, explaining and using the example of rsync. He said he

wanted something similar, while launching into a detailed technical discussion of

incremental and cumulative patch management. I have a good working knowledge of

rsync, but hadn’t heard such a detailed academic explanation of any open source tool

in any forum.

In both of those cases and many others, I wished I had this book ready to hand over

to highly trained and skilled people who wanted to learn Linux administration. Per-

haps you have had similar experiences and wished you had a book like this one at

hand. I venture to guess that ...