Customer Reviews

Official Red Hat Linux Administrator's Guide

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

 

 

I was really hoping for a good reference for doing real SysAdmin work, this book is too geared towards beginners. First hint is how it mainly covers using GUI Admin tools. It doesn't cover the files being modified by the GUI tools enough. Two other gripes the paper its printed on is very cheap almost like a phone book. Second the index is horrible. As an SysAdmin I live in indexes and table of contents so I can get to the specific information I need quickly. A bad index ruins a book for me as a good reference...

Sorry but adding some Kickstart info from the Customization guide and combining a few chapters into one doesn't really make this different then the Reference Guide I got with my software.

The material is good enough but I would have appreciated a disclaimer somewhere that told me I was buying the Reference Guide printed in a bigger font. The sections were slightly rearranged and they stripped off the numbering so it doesn't look quite like a manual but the words are the same (ok so a couple of the chapter intros were re-written, big deal). Sorry but this doesn't make the grade in my book.

When I first saw the book I was optimistic that I would be getting something that would be useful, this was my first mistake. This book has no value other than good fire starting potential, and that is questionable. Not only is the book unorganized and provides no information for the administration of Red Hat Linux, it has an index that an editor should be ashamed for letting go to press. I will never buy a book edited by REDHAT Press again. It is as if they thought working for Red Had made it alright to sell garbage to the users of Red Hat. Sincerely, Warming by the fire.

I have a copy. It has its good points and its bad points.

+ It quickly gets you set up using the Red Hat GUI tools. Using it so set up Samba and NFS was trivial.

- It is very Red Hat specific. It only rarely talks about the underlying Linux configuration files and formats.

- If anything goes wrong (say for example permissions were set incorrectly on /etc/myConfiguration), you will have NO CLUE what to do next if the GUI tool fails. You may not even know file names.

If you want to know how to do typical configuration tasks, and you stay close to the vanilla Red Hat installation, this book may be OK.

On the other hand, if you are using any other installation, or modifying default Red Hat tools, this book doesn't really help. It will NOT tell you much about what the GUI tool actually configured for you.

This book was a complete waste. I was looking for a book to help admin my RedHat servers. The format of this book is:

Overview of the topic.
What RPMs to install.

But does not explain what to do next or if there are problems. The best section is on RAID. If all you want to do is create a RAID device. There is nothing about recovery of a lost disk.

Buy the Unix System Administration Handbook (NEMETH).

An absolute *waste* of money. The Index should be renamed to "Random Words". It's no more than a few one-liners and screenshots.

You'd be better off using the "man" pages or using Redhats online documentation.

I will be avoiding any books these guys bring out.

This book is not an Administrator's guide. It's an manual. There
is alot of essential info to get you up and running and get everything configured,and some basic to intermediate system info to help you troubleshoot. But it looks like im going to be buying another book for real administration purposes. Also the index in this book is terrible. This book is for someone who is at the beginner to intermediate level. Good luck