Amazon.com Review
As Linux gains an ever larger foothold in organizational computing, matters of integrating it into networks and other systems become more pressing. The authors of
Professional Linux Deployment have combined forces to explain the technologies that exist to ease the process of making Linux machines cooperate with computers running Unix variants or Windows NT. There's plenty of Samba coverage here, of course, since that service is the best way to catch Server Message Block (SMB) calls from Windows NT, but this book goes far beyond Samba. Much of it has to do with documenting Linux solutions that parallel those for Microsoft operating systems. Coverage of MySQL, for instance, includes details on installing the software, setting up databases, and administering data and its users. There are explicit recipes for configuring a Linux computer as an Internet gateway and as a firewall. That's useful stuff, but the section on implementing Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) under Linux with EntireX, which includes lots of C++ code listings, deals with material that's not well covered elsewhere. This book also discusses setting up parallel-processing systems (something Linux is exceptionally good at--just ask NASA, which uses parallel-processing Linux machines in many of its projects). The coverage includes detailed instructions for setting up and using Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and MPICH, which is an implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI).
For detailed coverage of Samba on its own, consider Samba: Unix and NT Internetworking. There's excellent information on Linux as an IP chaining firewall in Linux Firewalls. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to configure computers running the Linux 2.2.x kernel for various enterprise roles, including Internet, database, directory, gateway, firewall, and proxy server. More exciting coverage deals with parallel processing via Message Passing Interface (MPI) and implementing Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) under Linux with EntireX.
From the Publisher
Who is this Book for?
People responsible for enterprise IT systems who are interested in Linux as a serious commercial platform that will support their business.
People in small/medium businesses and the public sector (schools, hospitals, libraries) who want to use Linux, either as their first system or a platform to migrate to.
