Perl for System Administration

This Book Will Show You How

In the 1966-68 “Batman” television show, the dynamic duo wore utility belts. If Batman and Robin had to scale a building, Batman would say, “Quick Robin, the Bat Grappling Hook! " Or Batman would say, “Quick Robin, the Bat Knockout Gas!” and they’d both have the right tool at hand to subdue the bad guys. This book aims to give you the utility belt you need to do good system administration work.

Every chapter attempts to provide you with three things.

Clear and concise information about a system administration domain.

In each chapter we discuss in depth one domain of the system administration world. The number of possible domains in multiplatform system administration is huge, far too many to be included in a single book. The best survey books on just Unix system administration, Essential System Administration, by Æleen Frisch (O’Reilly & Associates), and Unix System Administration Handbook, by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, and Trent R. Hein (Prentice-Hall), are two and three times, respectively, the size of this book. We’ll be looking at topics from three different operating systems: Unix, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and MacOS.

As a result, some hard choices were made on what to include and what to exclude. In general the topics that I believe will become even more important over the next five years made the cut. Important technologies like XML are explored because they are likely to have a significant impact on the field as time goes by. Unfortunately, these ...