Customer Reviews

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 Administrator's Handbook

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Kuo and Beland help the sysadmin who might be new to SUSE Linux. Conceptually, you can think of the book as two interwoved parts. The first part is explaining generic linux, or even unix, operations. Applicable to a Red Hat or Solaris machine, perhaps.

More pertinantly, the book goes into SUSE-specific abilities, with a natural emphasis on maintaining a secure system. The book is clearly directed at a sysadmin in a corporate environment, as opposed to a hobbyist with a home computer. So robustness and defending against malware are constant themes.

For example, you may want to offer anonymous ftp writing to your machine. By default, this directory often ends up in /var. Which means that users could, inadvertantly or not, end up filling the partition that /var/ sits on. Bad, because /var holds a lot of system log files, amongst other items. So the book suggests putting the anonymous ftp write directory on its own partition. Some other sysadmin books totally ignore this situation.

Careful attention should be paid to the last sections of the book, which discuss instrusion detection. A good precis of the main tools is furnished - for Ethereal, Nessus, nmap, Snort and others. You get enough details in the overview to understand their usages and their comparative advantages.