Customer Reviews

HP-UX 11i Systems Administration Handbook and Toolkit (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There are dozens of good UNIX administration books; this is the only one that covers comprehensively the feature set of HP/UX 11i. For that reason, you should definitely pick it up if you have HP UNIX machines to manage. It covers specific HP stuff well: SAM, the boot process, the backup utilities, virtual partitions, etc. The information is accurate and the overall style is easy to read. I think it's the most complete books on a given operating system I can think of: most authors/publishers would have divided the information here into at least two or three books: one for the basic UNIX stuff, one for regular HP sysadmin, and one for advanced features found in high-end HP servers. This book has all three.

It does fall down on occasion in terms of its editing. Overall, I tend not to trust the editing quality of books published by the company that produces the software (they don't exercise the editorial scrutiny because they want more books about their products), and this book is no exception. Sometimes, it strangely talks about things that aren't HP/UX, for instance, the section on CDE contains a lot of superfluous information (like what Sun puts in what drawer on the front panel) and the section on Samba is a weird mix of discussion of Samba on HPUX and on Linux. I can only imagine those sections were slapped in there from other papers without tailoring them for this book. There are some other annoying things that a good editor could have taken care of, for instance, repetition in between sections of the same chapter and screenshots/console dumps that have confusing information in them. One boot screenshot shows leftover console garbage that should have been removed, for instance. There are also occasional omissions, like any mention of using LDAP services, but all the basics are covered. There are some nice additions, too, such as information on setting up PRM and a nice tear-out card with hardware commands.

I still give this book a 4/5, because none of its flaws prevent it from being very useful and informative. If a good technical editor put it under the knife, it would definitely deserve the status of best HPUX-specific book. Right now it holds that position, but mostly due to the lack of titles out there that concentrate on HP UNIX.

I got this book along with Rehman's in order to study for the HP-UX certification exam. At first I wasn't too impressed with this title, as it seemed overly verbose and a good bit of the book seemed to be mere man page runoffs. But as I read through it, I saw that it was actually a very helpful workbook, which served me as a sort of lab manual to the Rehman's book. The book was overly verbose and repetitive in some places and that is a big minus, but all the same, the authors do give many, many examples, which makes it easy to see how to use each of the important commands on HP-UX. A separate chapter is given to each topic and this allows the book to go into much more detail for important items such as sed, awk, vi and the Korn shell than other books. (I have also noticed that things like this often come in handy quite often, even though it may not seem time well spent initially.) The man pages are included in the book not just to have printouts of them, but to be READ! So many users could benefit a lot from having read these admittedly dull instructions. The various ways you can use the commands will go a long way towards making a power user out of you and in turn, giving you a good idea of how HP-UX actually works. the book really does emphasise that. This is a manual on system administration, however, and is not merely a study guide and to get the proper benefit from it, rather than trying to "cram" it, one should spend about a year with an HP-UX server and this book to get really familiar with the system and to absorb all of the quirks of HP-UX to the fullest. There are a few typos, but those are pretty obvious. All in all, a very good guide.

I used this book to learn HP-UX while setting up a new HP server (the A500). At first, it served as an intuitive "quick start" guide and later as my favorite reference book--being comprehensive enough to resolve every issue I came across. The author demonstrates a great understanding of HP's operating system and unlike most computer savvy folks, he is able to impart that knowledge in a way I can easily understand it.

As a Systems Engineer working mainly with hardware for the past 4 years I have found reference materials a necessity when tackling operating system issues. I have found Marty Poniatowski's books to be most helpful in these matters. The HP-UX 11i System Administration Handbook and Toolkit is the latest in a series of books Marty has written which system administrators have relied on to answer questions about their HPUX systems and configurations. I know this to be true through conversations with admins while attending various HP classes and seminars over the past several years. In each case almost everyone I have spoken with has used these books to maintain their systems and further their careers. I can personally say that I have used Marty's books in order to gain my certifications in HP 9000 Workstations & Servers as well as the HP-UX 11.0 Technical Professional exam.

I used this handbook to get a better picture of HP-UX system administration and as supplement to the CSA exam study guide.. In fact this book helped me well in my preparation for the HP-UX CSA exam. It covers wide range of topics related to system administration. The book is heavy but very resourceful. I like it and I am keeping it aroung for a while.

If you want to grasp the newset HP-UX release, then this book will set you sailing in the right direction. There are entire chapters devoted to HP Veritas and Logical Volume Manager and all the info you need to become proficient in the use of them. I just got the book quite recently and already have a Samba server running on my workstation at home and NFS mounts coming from my Linux box ( I'm trying to stress the systems out!) There is good info on HP proprietary software that runs on HP-UX and this is always a plus when it comes to a professional setting.
There are great scripting examples and all them useful in infromation gathering. There is so much information in the 1800 page monster that I can see myself using this book for years to come.

The author's previous book helped to land me a job as a HP-UX admin with HP! For this reason alone (although there many others) I will continue to purchase Poniatowski's books as they are best guide I have found for the choppy seas of Unix.

I badly needed a book to help be more than a quick reference, yet less than a full set of manuals. This book is it. It's right to the point, addressing the boot process, LVM and Veritas VM, emergency recovery with Ignite and a bunch of good shell info. If you're in the same boat, buy this book before any other!

This book is a must have for Sys Admins!!! It's a great book for reference and day to day issues. Contents are laid out in a fashion to assist those unfamiliar with specifc commands to see the "what if" scenarios of using a command including warnings.

This book accomplishes it's objective which it to cover the things that admins need to know.

It was also, nice to read about vpars which until now I have found no other information on. I hope to see Marty P. come out with more details on that subject, too.

Go for it!!! If you just starting with 11i this is the book!! Author has made good attempt of covering the latest topics - virtual partition, PRM, EFI (Itanium based firmware). Book also include different manual pages for quick refernce. There are three separate sections covering genreal admin topic (beginners), advance admin topics and latest tech topics. There is separate chapter with the detailed booting information. This is a lot of information and it gives better understanding of HP boot process. In all one will find almost everything a system admin needs to start with HP-UX and advance to higher level.

It is a pretty good book, but poorly indexed. Has valuable tips if you are not experienced, but most of the data found here can be found by searching the internet. For half the price, it would be a good book

Many changes and improvements are occuring in the HP-UX operating system at a rapid pace. Call it an evolution of sorts, and for this reason administrators need to evolve also. The best source of information to assist you in accomplishing your goals is this book. HP-UX System Administration Handbook and Toolkit(Second Edition) is much more than a refinement of a previous version of this book. Marty Poniatowski has added new information including web based kernel tuning, hard partitions(nPartitions), and Virtual Partitions(vPars). The partitioning information is an absolute must for those interested in efficiently utilizing the hardware which they administer. Most companies use multiple systems at only a small percentage of their individual computing power. Partitioning allows these same machines to perform as multiple systems thus utilizing a higher percentage of their capabilities and consolidating on hardware costs. The best source for properly understanding this and other HP-UX tasks is this book.