Customer Reviews

Essential System Administration, Third Edition

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

From the book--" This book is the foundation volume for O'Reilly & Associates' system administration series...provides you with the fundamental information needed by everyone who takes care of UNIX systems...consciously avoids trying to be all things to all people; the other books in the series treat individual topics in 'complete' detail." This book gives he reader a good understanding of what goes on under the hood of a UNIX system, without getting you bogged down in the details, and also points out the diff. and sim. b/w many variants of the OS(BSD,SCO,AIX,...). You need to know a little about scripts and a few tools to get the most of the book, it's not for complete beginners, but it is very clearly written. I had been using Linux for about 9 months before buying this book, and had worked with SCO and SunOS on the job for about 5 or so years(off and on). Almost every page had an answer to a question I have asked myself over that time. "UNIX Power Tools"(1-56592-260-3)works really well as a companion book to this one. tells the ins and outs of the commands and such.

I'm a graduate student in chemistry who purchased this book when I was charged with assisting my department's system administrator. I had previous experience as an occasional Unix user, but certainly was no expert.

This book was a very useful resource to me in my first few months on the job, and still provides me with answers to occasional problems I run into. The conversational tone and organization by subject matter made the book very readable when I wanted to sit down with it, but it also was modular enough so that I could skip to whatever topics I needed to learn about quickly. The author's descriptions of her own experiences as system administrator have an honest and practical feel to them. (For example, early in the book she gives a time breakdown of her typical day with tasks ranging from setting up new user accounts to moving around office furniture to accomodate new computer equipment.)

For me, an added strength of this book is that it provides descriptions of how to accomplish the same task on different variants of Unix. This has been especially important for me since I deal with computers running Digital Unix, AIX, IRIX, and Linux. The book does a good job of taking a seemingly overwhelming amount of material and presenting it in a very manageable format.

Clearly a Unix book can't contain every answer in the world, but I find that this book still is a place I go to first for answers unless I'm looking for a very specific piece of information. I think this book is excellent for the intermediate Unix user who suddenly finds himself or herself in the position of caring for a number of computers. This is the most useful general purpose Unix book that I have purchased, and I recommend it highly.

If you are performing any level of system administration on any varient of Unix then this is a great book to have on your desk. It covers just about all aspects of system administration necessary for small to medium systems and networks.

Each topic is dealt with first by an approachable description of what is going on, a discussion of the differences between different systems and some examples of commands or configuration files together with a discussion of what each example is doing and how it does it. It really is an easy way to work out what you need to do on your own system.

The structure works equally well as an aide memoir or as a tutorial to a new topic and this is backed up by an effective index which seems to guide me to the right part of the book much more reliably than is the case in many computing texts.

Although the book, even in its second edition, is now several years old, it is still relevant. The basics if the task do not change and, even if the task in hand has changed a little, reading and understanding the section in the book will leave you well placed to sort out minor variations which is not something that you would get from just plugging away at the man pages.

The main thing that is missing as a result of this is coverage of completely new material, don't expect to find anything about IPv6 or running a webserver for example. That is not such a big problem though as if you are dealing with these issues, you will almost certainly need books on those subjects as well as a general admin book.

For me, it is simple, this is a book that lives on my desk and not on my bookshelf. It helps me out with my mixed network of Linux, Solaris, SunOS and FreeBSD.

I really liked how the author organized this book by task, and then provided an explanation of each task in Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, etc. A very well organized, easy to follow reference that should be on every UNIX System Administrators bookshelf. The beginning SysAdmin should find it very educational. Intermediate SysAdmins should find this book to be an essential reference. Advanced SysAdmins may want to teach out of this book. All in all, well worth your time.

Your first book should be "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, & Hein. I always turn to that book first. I am not sure I would buy Frisch's "Essential System Administration" again. Definitly try to get it used if you do buy it. Looking in this book is often a last resort, and often if I haven't found the answer in my other two books, then it normally isn't in this one either.

It is a big book, much of which I feel is fluff, but if this was your only book on the topic, you would still be ok. The wording just isn't as clear as I'd prefer.

This book should be called Indispensable and Complete System Administration. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but not by much. No book will ever be the complete book on Unix or Linux admin, but this one has so much material in it, it will be quite some time before I start looking for material not in the book. Every aspect of System Administration is covered in this book. The material goes into details as necessary, but the author does a good job of not getting bogged down in the details or overwhelming the reader with irrelevant or arcane knowledge that only a handful of people will use. What you will find is broad and thorough coverage of the material in an accessible, easy to read style.
One of the things I appreciate most about this book is the organization. Rather than listing out a bunch of technical information, each chapter deals with a specific task that a sysadmin needs to be able to do, and the information to carry out that task is contained within the chapter, rather than making references to other chapters or appendices, as is common practice.
This is another book that delivers the excellence I've come to expect from O'Reilly.

I purchased this book as to satisfy my fascination with unix-based systems - I mean, after a while cd, mv, and mkdir just won't do anymore. It is an excellent book explaining the intricacies of unix-based systems and the differences between them. It covers topics such as the management of processes and devices, the filesystem, essentials in administrative tools, startup and shutdown, managing users, securing your system from others, automating your work, backups, system resources, even configuring kernels and TCP/IP Network Management. It explains everything in great detail in a way that's clear to understand while making the reader feel good about him/herself. Even though I didn't end up a system administrator after reading the book, I enjoyed it.

At first glance, this book seems like a typical O'Reilly book: a narrow title, rich in material, and is beneficial to a much wider audience than the title reveals. It covers a wide range of system administration subjects and goes way beyond just the essentials.

Over the years, I have administered several multi-user UNIX, Linux, and FreeBSD servers. I believed that I knew the essentials, because if I did not, I would not have been able to do my job all these years. I wanted to see if the things that I learned by experience, often the hard way, are included in "Essential System Administration". Sure enough, they were all there. Not only that, but they are laid out simply, without much unnecessary technical details, and accompanied by numerous examples and anecdotal encounters by the author. If you read one section, you would be able to apply the knowledge and skills that it describes right away. For instance, you don't need to read the entire manual of procmail in order to write some effective mail filters; chapter 9 has a section on "Mail Filtering with procmail" that covers the essentials.

One impressive feature of this book is that it covers how to do things on a variety of operating system including various flavours of UNIX, Linux, and BSD. In the past, I often ran into a situation where I knew how to do something on FreeBSD, but did not know how to accomplish the same task on Solaris. With this book by my side, I will not have this problem again.

Another feature of the book is that it covers a very, VERY, very wide variety of administrative topics: from every day system management, to operating system internals, to various devices, to backing up, to scheduling, to rebuilding the kernel. I am yet to find a task, whether typical or atypical, that is not covered in "Essential System Administration".

But wait, are not most, if not all, of these topics encountered in a user's daily life? Are mail filters limited only to system administrators? Of course not! Many users organize their email by defining personal mail filters. And what about devices? Every user who uses a Linux-based desktop computer goes through the frustration of configuring devices at some point. "Essential System Administration" is really written to be useful for any UNIX/Linux/BSD user, not only system administrators.

On a second thought, any one who owns a computer running UNIX/Linux/BSD is the administrator of one's system. Not only that, but anyone who uses one of these system must still manage their own account and perform tasks such as scheduling tasks, emailing, and printing. "Essential System Administration" was not written for system administrators in the traditional sense -- someone who is paid to administer an expensive system with hundreds or thousands of users -- but for the administrator in the broad sense -- any user who wishes to perform some management tasks on their system.

"Essential System Administration" is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to become an expert in system administration, and is a useful resource for users of these systems. I give this book 4.5 out of 5.

Did you know the "-p" option of "mkdir" can create several directory levels at once: "mkdir -p all/these/at/once" ? Or that you can use "cp -p" to preserve the modification times of the original file? Ever use "man -k <keyword>"? After thirteen years of Unix, I learned many new tricks including commands I never used before but now can't live without, like xargs. I now have a 100% rock-solid understanding of Unix file system permissions, including SUID, SGID, sticky bit, etc. Many formerly nebulous areas are now crystal clear.

Someone criticized this book for harping too much on SCO, a less popular version of Unix. It's true, but those parts are well-marked and quickly skipped.

I have bought some mediocre O'Reilly books, but this one's full of precious tidbits and lucid explanations. It's a major confidence-booster, mandatory for aspiring power users and developers. (If you are really doing system administration then the Nemeth, et. al. book is also a must-have; it's more pure admin. If you feel you must choose between the two books, get off it and buy both!) This will give you some knowledge your local admins don't have. If you work in a competitive environment, this is some serious armament.

I am fairly new to Linux. After being repeatedly frustrated by books such as "Mastering Linux" which offer little in the way of any concrete Linux knowledge, I came across this book at a bookstore. I immediately bought it and was pleased to discover that it essentially answered almost every UNIX question that I had. This book goes in depth where other books fail, and describes how to do things via the command line, where books such as Mastering Linux only tend to tell you how to do things through KDE and GNOME. Don't miss this one; it reads like a novel. I could hardly put it down.