Customer Reviews

Managing NFS and NIS (Nutshell Handbooks)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Hello, My name is Mike Eisler, and I am one of the
co-authors of Managing NFS and NIS, Second Edition.
I'm writing this note to offer additional information
to potential readers.

At the time I submitted this note, most of the
customer reviews for this book referred to the first edition.
One of the reviews states that the book is focused on NFS
version 2 over UDP and the old style automounter.
Actually, you'll find the second edition of our book
is more modern. New topics in the second edition
include NFS version 3, NFS over TCP, modern autofs-based
automounters, Kerberos V5 authentication for NFS, NFS Access
Control Lists (ACLs), and client side fail over.

Another difference is that first edition of this book
used SunOS 4.x as a reference for examples. The second
edition uses Solaris 8.

The second edition provides information you won't find
in NFS product documentation, such as using tools like ethereal
to debug NFS problems. This book will give you the benefit of
insights from people who probably wrote some of the code for
your clients and servers. You may find (and I hope) that
it will save you the trouble reporting a problem to
your vendor's customer support line.

Thank you for considering our book.

Does not leave out essential information. Gives useful examples where needed. Though not a beginner to Unix, I was not very familiar with NIS and NFS. I was very pleased to find a Unix book that gave me all I wanted to know in an understandable format. This is not always the case with the O'reilly books.

I was formerly the UNIX Systems Administrator of large company where we had several variants of the UNIX operating system employed.

We had a very robust NIS and NFS environment with hundreds of NFS mount points and a dozen or more NIS maps.

The text and examples of this book enabled me to better maintain and update our environment. The practical guidelines for NIS map and application building provided concise information that was easily implemented.

In the area of NFS administration, the book provided valuable performance and tuning information, as well as diagnostic information to determine where problems could lie.

Additionally, I enjoyed the sections on Networking Fundamentals and NFS Design and operation. These were a nice refresher for knowledge previously attained.

While no one book can give all the answers to real world problems, this one at least shows practical application whereby a professional can apply the fundamentals to solve their own problems.

Overall, as a UNIX systems administrator, I found this book to be a "MUST HAVE" item for the professionals' bookshelf.

Anyone who has ever administered a network of at least 3-4 servers (if not more) will find individually updating accounts, software and such to be a burden. I found myself in this situation not too long ago, and then I picked up this book, and found the answers I was looking for.

Most Unix admins have heard of NFS and NIS but might not have considered using them together. This book gives a very thorough discussion each topic, how to set it up, how to deal with advanced issues, and how to troubleshoot. Admins will really develop an appreciation for how useful these tools can be, especially when used together.

Though LDAP is gaining prominence, a network utilizing NIS, NFS, and automounter is still a very nice network to administer. Even just learning NFS/automounter is time well spent because it is a service not likely to go away. I really felt this this book was worth the time and money because it really helps the intermediate to advanced admin better gain control of the network (instead of the network controlling him :). Definintely give this book a try. Enjoy!

O'Reilly puts out so many well written books and the quality of the authors is usually the highest, and this book is no exception. Both of these subjects are covered in more than enough detail for anyone need to setup NFS, NIS, or both. It is written in such a way that you son't have to read straight through, but can use it as a reference for the information you need. I would recommend this book for anyone neededing a decent to thorough understanding of this topic.

This book is quite outdated. For example, it predates NFS version 3, NFS over TCP (mostly the default these days), or autofs.

If you are a beginner and are looking for fundamental information this book might be useful if you remain aware of its shortcomings. It covers the fundamentals of NFS V2 over UDP, and NIS quite well, and has a good troubleshooting section, which might help beginners negotiate the interoperability and tuning issues that are common in today's multivendor environments. It covers automounting issues quite well, from an "automount" (SunOS 4) perspective.

I primarly use *BSD and was hoping to learn about NFS/NIS from this book, more than what I had already gleaned from the man pages. However this book is very heavily geared towards the Solaris OS. It does give exlamples of where the filename(s) or folder structures under a different flavor of Unix would be, but exept for these small tables, the rest of the text uses only the Solaris names/folders.