Customer Reviews

The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Good sysadmins know the technical details. They can resurrect a dead server, understand the intricacies of sendmail or the Windows registry, and recite all of the types of DNS records by heart. They own copies of the UNIX System Administration Handbook and refer to them regularly. They are good sysadmins, and will contribute solidly at an intermediate level.

Great sysadmins know all of that and what is in this book. They are the ones who go on to become the senior sysadmins and consultants, have fabulous careers, and are respected by their bosses, co-workers, and customers.

There is much more to a technical job than simply the technical skills. Don't buy this book to learn how to run a system or you will be disappointed. Do, however, buy it to learn how to be an effective professional systems administrator.

It is also useful for a manager of sysadmins who is either non-technical, or has never been a sysadmin himself, as it is a good introduction to the issues and concerns that sysadmins need to face.

Limoncelli and Hogan cover many topics, including:

- Trouble ticket systems
- Desktops and Servers (how they're the same, differ, etc.)
- Administrative networks (why bother?)
- Requirements (gathering, tracking, etc.)
- Standards and centralization of services
- How to do debugging (not "you see this problem, do this" but rather learning the process of doing good debugging)
- Fix things once, not over and over again
- Security policies (including management and organizational issues for a variety of organizational profiles)
- Disaster Recovery (again, not how to backup data, but why you'd want to, legal issues, etc.)
- Systems Administration Ethics
- Change management and revision control
- Maintenance windows: what they are and why they're good for both you and your users
- Centralization versus Decentralization
- Helpdesks: sizing, scope, processes, escalation, etc.
- Data centers (many physical facility concerns that sysadmins don't often think of, including how to move a datacenter)
- Managing non-OS software (commercial and free)

They will help you answer questions like

- Does server hardware really cost more? Do we go with a few expensive servers or many cheap ones?
- What does "redundancy" actually mean?
- Why would we spend money on backups? There's never been an outage...
- What do I do when asked to do something illegal?
- How do I communicate and schedule large system changes?
- How do I do a safe server upgrade?
- They want to decentralize the sysadmin group -- what do we do?
- How do we move our datacenter?
- What sort of policy issues are there with email?
- How do I deal with my customers abusing printers?
- What do we have to worry about if we're implementing remote access (e.g. dialup modem banks) for our users?

Finally, they close with an entire section on Management:

- How to deal with cost centers, management chains, hiring, customer support, and outsourcing.
- How to manage your customers perceptions and your team's visibility
- How to manage your own happiness (time management, communication, professional development, managing your manager, etc.)
- How to be a technical manager, how to work with non-technical managers, manage your own career growth, etc.
- How to hire good sysadmins, recruiting, interviewing, soft skills, technical skills, employee retention, etc.
- The special concerns around how to fire sysadmins (often problematic, given their higher level of access)

They even have a chapter for non-technical managers who are in charge of sysadmins (this entire book would be very useful to give to a non-technical manager who doesn't really 'get it'.)

The book closes with three appendixes:

A. The Many Role of a System Administrator
B. What to Do When...
C. Acronyms

Appendix B is particularly useful, answering a wide variety of questions with solid, practical answers.

The skills and concepts in this book are the make-or-break in many careers. They turn you from just another sysadmin into a star performer, sensitive to your customers and the business, able to interact with a wide spectrum of people.

As a UNIX sysadmin veteran, I wish this book had been around when I started out. It would have saved so many headaches as I "learned the hard way."

Though not a nitty gritty technical book, this one is a must have for every sysadmin, regardless of skill level or the technology s/he uses. For the novice admin, it offers a good big picture look at the most important "whys" of system administration. For the intermediate admin, it has great advice on how to balance fire fighting with project work that will lessen the need for the fire fighting. For the senior admin, there are gems of design wisdom and sections on how to deal with being in a managerial or team leader role. Because it's more high level, this book is even a good buy for people who manage sysadmins but are not themselves technical.

The chapters are conveniently split into the "basics" and the "icing," depending on the skill of the reader and the state of the reader's work environment. The authors back up their sound advice with real world case studies and personal experiences. Best of all, not only was it a good read cover to cover, it's organized so that the reader can come back to it as a reference later.

Kudos to Tom and Christine for writing an excellent book, one which I will certainly be recommending to my clients and colleagues!

The book market is flooded with books that will tell you all about the technical details of administering various software products and operating systems. Their scope is usually limited to whatever technical product is being written about and they become outdated as quickly as the technology becomes outdated. This book is very different. It gives guidelines in a very readable, coaching style, that can be applied to many different aspects of the System Administration trade.

I have been a System Administrator for a few years now, but this book clarifies many of the issues that I work with daily. It's like a having a mentor on my bookshelf that I can pull down and consult for advice. I especially like the whole section of seven chapters dealing with different aspects of management. These chapters should be mandatory reading for every SA -- and their bosses.

The book is written in a very readable style and has many useful and insightful real-world examples that show that the authors have been around and learned a lot on the way. The book is worth reading just for these examples. I read the book from cover to cover.

I first heard about this book when I attended a seminar Tom Limoncelli
taught at the 2003 LISA conference titled "Time Management for System Administrators: How to Keep from Going (More) Crazy". Many of the topics in the seminar are covered in detail in the book.

If you're a system administrator, you should read this book.

"The Practice of System and Network Administration" (TPOSANA) sat on my shelf for nearly a year before I read it. I wish now I'd read it a year ago! It's rare to find a book useful to both Windows and UNIX system administrators, but rarer still to read one designed to improve one's career and attitude.

TPOSANA is a 'framework' book. It teaches you how to think and leaves out the implementation details. System administration isn't all about man pages and tech books. The authors' principles -- simplicity, clarity, generality, automation, communication, and basics first -- will make a good sys admin great and a great sys admin extraordinary.

Others have outlined the TPOSANA contents, so I'll share my favorite aspects of the book. The writing is lively and witty, with memory-jogging conclusions nicely summarizing each chapter's contents. The text is filled with dozens of applicable and informative case studies. Finally, the authors devote seven chapters to fundamental management and personal attitude issues, showing they know people and processes matter as much as products.

I highly recommend TPOSANA. The sad irony is those most needing to read this book will push it aside, as I initally did. Those who take the time to read it will be glad they did. Anyone acting in a technical capacity -- sys admins, engineers, and programmers -- will find it enlightening and entertaining.

I am very impressed by this book. I've been a Unix sysadmin
for more than 10 years and this is the best book I have read for
explaining and demonstrating basic and advanced principles
of system administration. And it goes beyond administration
of any particular OS or system type. You could apply this
to your work architecting, supporting, implementing or
administering any computer or network service.

I have many technical books. I do not read them all cover
to cover. But I will completely devour this one.

I work on a team of 18 (already excellent!) Unix sysadmins.
I would love to have every team member read this book --
our team would be better for it.
you may especially enjoy the section on sysadmin salary negotiations.

If you are looking for a fundamentals book on Unix or Windows 2000 operating systems, go elsewhere. This book is completely about the methodologies for architecting, running and maintaining your IT data center. It's the best book in its class hands down.

If you're an experienced SysAdmin, then you will have already learned most of the hard lessons this book can help you avoid, but it can still be valuable to sit down and see them all presented in one place. Almost universally this book covers the "right way" to do things, and will essentially never become outdated, since it avoids discussion of any particular technologies (for the most part).

If you're new to system administration, then this book is your bible. Read it, digest it, and use its ideas in your work every day and you will be light years ahead of other sysadmins, who will be learning all of these lessons the hard way.

As for complaints about this book not having implementation ideas, of course it doesn't; the red book (now purple) or the O'Reilly book is perfectly good for that, that's not the point at all of this book. This book is discussing a methodology for system administration, not a nuts and bolts reference. It's can't be the only book about system administration on your desktop, but it should _definitely_ be there.

This book is to seniors in the field what the Nemeth/Hein/et al System Administration Handbook is to newcomers. It is clearly written, with excellent discussion of the rationale and thoughts behind making various decisions. Whether it's designing a site from scratch, attempting to normalize legacy structures, or learning to put forward your ideas at the corporate level - and get buy-in, there's something here for everyone. This book is clearly a classic, and sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf.

The thing about this book is that it's a theoretical treatise on systems administration as a discipline in and of itself. There's no other book like it on the market, and Limoncelli and Hogan do a great job of showing us the core competencies and knowledge that define a systems administrator, the knowledge that has nothing to do with what specific systems or networks we're actually running. Up until now, the only way you'd get this knowledge was if you were lucky enough to apprentice under an experienced systems administrator or if you read between the lines of other systems administration books, and figured out the metaknowledge contained in their lists of commands to type and single platform descriptions.

If you're a new sysadmin starting out, reading this book will give you the edge that would take at least 5-10 years on the job to get--and only a few sysadmins who attack the job from more of an academic perspective will get. It's mostly a book about how to think, much like a liberal arts education teaches you how to think. Perhaps the liberal arts background of the authors is showing a bit.

If you're an experienced sysadmin, you still probably haven't put it all together this way before. If you're a manager, you need to read both the chapters on how to manage sysadmins, as well as the chapters that tell what your sysadmins will be doing to get what they want from you.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in systems administration as a discipline, science, art, career, or job function.

I agree with some of the worse reviews: This book addresses all the touchy-feely stuff not found in other manuals.

That, however, is what it's for (It's plainly stated on the book! Read the friendly Meta-Manual!) and it <em>is</em> in fact a wonderfully lucidly written cornucopia of information in that field. It also is delightfully platform-independent, even if it is perceivable that the authors have a UNIX background (but which Sysad doesn't?).

It's a simple fact that Sysads get other things wrong more often than the tech stuff: Communicating changes, seeing it all from the user's POV, negotiating (yes, they deal with salary, too), saying "yes" so that it isn't understood as "yes to all"; saying "no" so that it isn't understood as "fsck you!".

That's why we're often hated as arrogant BOfHs. This manual endeavours to fix that, and it just might succeed.