Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux Internet Server

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

 

 

Setting up a Red Hat Internet Server? Then "Red Hat Linux
Internet Server" is the book for you. I had previously read Red
Hat Press's "Red Hat Linux Networking and System Administration"
by Collings and Wall. Though a good book, I had expected a bit
more from one blessed by Red Hat. "Red Hat Linux Internet
Server" does live up to its expectations of being blessed by Red
Hat. "Red Hat Linux Internet Server" is the better of the two
books.

This book is better focused on its subject of setting up an
Internet server and its more common Internet services. There is
lots of practical advice based on what is considered SOP for good
Unix/Linux Internet server schemes. (From my own experiences, I
did not find anything to disagree with them on and I liked their
take on learning the CLI first before going off into GUI-land.)
At least a quarter of the book is focused on security (a good
thing). I suspect this has much to do with Jay Beale, being from
the Bastille Project. Noteworthy are chapter 3 on setting up
DSL, chapter 10 on the Postfix mail server and chapter 13 doing
backups via Amanda.

If you are new to Red Hat Linux and can afford it, buy both
books. If you've been around awhile in the Red Hat world, then
Sery & Beale's book is the better choice.

I like the book's "get right to work" attitude, providing code that implements configurations that are not academic, but actually useful. But, once a book as adopted this philosophy, I expect that they provide correct code, or else the value significantly is diminished.

An example of this is found in Chapter 4, "Building a Firewall" in which firewall code is provided. On p. 84 (and 89-90), one sees code such as:

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p -s $PRIV -j ACCEPT

The problem is that the environment variable PRIV has not been defined in the book (and never is). This is a "show stopper" error in the book for us. I looked to the publisher's website, wiley.com, for errata but found no support for the book. I contacted Wiley by e-mail and they forwarded us an unpublished URL:

[website]

Unfortunately, the updates (errata) section is empty and the downloads section not only has the above error in the online version of the firewall rules collection, but has additional variables that are referenced without being defined (SWCP, SRC, SON).

These types of errors make me wonder if the code in the book was properly tested... and worse, increase my concern that the code in the book in other areas will prove to be unreliable.

The errors in the book, compounded by poor website support, compel me to reduce the rating of this book to only 3 stars.

It appears that IF you buy a used copy of this book, you have to download the Red Hat ISO images in order to install the operating system, which happens to be RH version 7.2. As of the time that I post this comment on this, the ISOs can be downloaded at ftp://archive.kernel.org/redhat-archive/redhat/linux/7.2/en/ . I recommend using the Filezilla ftp client for the download. I wish the writers of the book HAD specified WHICH version to use somewhere need the beginning of the book.

This is not a detailed narrative or technical language book. I was expecting a more detailed technical explaination of the topic, but instead i was faced to extensive examples that made no sense to help with learning. The book uses examples that were not well introduced, such as the network topology of the examples, server names, etc... there is no reference or apendix that remembers what is the topology of each example, so if you cannot use the book as just a reference as you lose track of what the examples are about. For this type of topic a more graphic book is important. To conclude, I believe the book has some good content but it was poorly structured and written, so it vanishes among its pages. I gave up of trying to learn from this book.

The book is good, but like I said before is there any page without an error????? There is no published errata for the book too!!!