UNIX System Administrator's Bible [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Yves Lepage (Author), Paul Iarerra (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
While many books in this series are plodding, multi-author tomes to which editors add tons of ancillary information, Unix System Administrator's Bible is the exception. If you've just been assigned Unix administration duties and have little knowledge of the operating system, this book will get you up to speed quickly.

Authors LePage and Iarrera begin with a quick overview of key system-administration commands, then get into some conceptual information about how various elements (hardware, kernel, etc.) combine to form a Unix system. They pay a lot of attention to networking and include intelligent documentation on the security risks involved in putting a Unix machine on a network.

This book really excels in its coverage of the "soft" (but hardly unimportant) aspects of administration. How do you plan a file system for an academic environment, as opposed to a transaction-intensive business environment? What kind of backup policy do you need? Clearly, much of the real-life information here derives from LePage's experiences as a system administrator at McGill University and Iarrera's experiences in his consulting business. For example, a story about tracking down and solving a POP server performance problem is not only informative, but as much of a page turner as any mystery novel.

The complete BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) 2.2.5, with source, appears on the companion CD-ROM. --David Wall

Product Description
Finally, an all-in-one reference written for UNIX administrators of every level. Gone are the days of rifling through several books looking for the information you need. UNIX® System Administrators Bibles in-depth instructions and detailed case studies will help you tackle all your UNIX challenges, from installing and optimizing your system to achieving year 2000 compliance.

Included with the book is a CD-ROM featuring all of the important resources youll need to get started, such as compilers and debuggers for various platforms, security packages, Internet server software, and the full distribution copy of FreeBSD 2.2.5.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 628 pages
• Publisher: Wiley Publishing (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076453162X
• ISBN-13: 978-0764531620
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,634,649 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better titled "UNIX System Management Leisure Reading", January 14, 2000

By	Yong Huang (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This book is for managers, not for techies. Quite different from Aelene Frisch's or Nemeth's books, this book talks a lot about management issues and sometimes tells us real world stories. However, writing too much about these in an overly verbose manner makes me feel uneasy about the price of the book. Verbose talk on such topics is typically published in magazines which you read once and discard. Since the authors want to distinguish them from Frisch and Nemeth by these topics, I'd love them to tell us more real world stories like the three cases in Chapter 13. Or tell us more on what to watch for in vmstat, iostat etc. in the context of a real working environment. In addition, authors' and editors' fault on letting screen output inappropriately wrap, frequent typos (such as "./etc" instead of "/etc") all reduce the value of this book. Some people find some code snippets in this book valuable. Me too. Such as timedexec (I assume the authors wrote this program). But in other cases such as the buffer overflow attack, the authors should at least describe the logic of the source code instead of just listing the original code. I guess it's too difficult for them too.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good book, slightly biased toward Solaris, June 23, 2000

By	Nikolai N Bezroukov "kievite" (Budd Lake, NJ) - See all my reviews

It's impossible to cover everything about Unix in one book. And this book should not be you the first or the only Unix sysadmin book. I think that book devoted to a particular flavor of Unix (one that you are using) should be the first one. But this is a very good general book and it does contain information that other books often miss to cover. IMHO the book is slightly biased toward Solaris. A couple of chapters would be interesting for a professional of any level and that IMHO more than justify the cost of the book.

For example I especially like Ch.5 (TCP/IP networking), Ch.7 (Administration Roles and Strategies) and Ch 19 (Setting up DNS server). Your mileage may vary.

I think the biggest success of the book is Chapter 7: Administration Roles and Strategies.That chapter is a must for a novice sysadmin and is very useful for professionals too. Another interesting part of the book is a very educating case study (a non-trivial POP client troubleshooting case) in the chapter 13.

It's one of the best general books on Unix administration.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars So-So, August 14, 2001

By	SeaMomma (ARLINGTON, VA) - See all my reviews

This book was good for reviewing terms and concepts after leaving sysadm for a couple of years. It's not very good for applying to anything.