Pro Ubuntu Server Administration (Expert's Voice in Linux) [Paperback]

Sander Vugt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430216220 | ISBN-13: 978-1430216223 | Publication Date: December 2, 2008 | Edition: 1

Building on lessons taught in Beginning Ubuntu Server Administration, Sander van Vugt’s newest book Pro Ubuntu Server Administration teaches advanced Ubuntu system building. Topics covered include managing simple file servers, virtual servers, performance monitoring and optimization, high-availability clusters, and advanced LDAP integrated networking.

Ubuntu continues to lead the market in Linux server deployments—it currently has ¼ of the market; which is a much larger share than both SUSE and Red Hat. This is a necessary title for system administrators that need intermediate-advanced networking techniques.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sander van Vugt has authored almost 40 books on computing. This is his 6th Linux book, and his 3rd Ubuntu book, all for Apress. He is an extremely successful Linux trainer, consultant and implementer, and he is teaching in the US, UK and Europe. He believes that writing books is an addiction which he would like to indulge for many years to come.

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430216220
• ISBN-13: 978-1430216223
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,012,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of several books, most of which are about Linux in professional environments. These include "Beginning the Linux Command Line", "Beginning Ubuntu Server Administration" and "Pro Ubuntu Server Administration". Being a Linux user since 1992, the motivation to write books came early. Much of the documentation that you'll find on line (especially in the early days of Linux) was hard to read, so I wanted to translate that information into something that's understandable. I'm like the guy between the developer and the end user. Writing books is not the only way I accomplish this goal. Apart from being an author, I'm a technical trainer as well, delivering Linux courses all over the planet. And if a customer has something interesting, I might be willing to do some consultancy projects as well. In the past few years, most of these have included Linux High Availability and Virtualization.

Apart from all that, I have a personal life as well. I live in the Netherlands (that's a small country in Europe in case you've never heard of it). I like to travel, and my work allows me to do that often and I like running and photography. In fact, right now I'm preparing for my first marathon, which will be end of October this year.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but needs more depth, December 27, 2008

By 

J. P. Mens (Germany, Europe) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Ubuntu Server Administration (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

Apress' Pro Ubuntu Server Administration is described by its author, Sander van Vugt, as the best book he's ever written; he should know -- it's his fourtysecond book.

The table of contents is mouth-watering: server installation, system imaging, performance monitoring and optimization, file system management, network monitoring, SAN, configuring OpenLDAP, integrating Samba, adding a mail server, server security, setting up an OpenVPN server, Kerberos and NTP, topped by troubleshooting. The list contains almost all an administrator wants to have to set up an advanced server in an enterprise environment.

The chapter on SAN contains goodies such as DRBD and iSCSI and, as in most chapters, you learn to set them up more in a howto fashion, with a bit of background information. IMO there isn't enough background coverage to get the reader up to snuff -- if something goes wrong, I'm left in the rain. For example, when covering the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD), Sander shows me how to set it up, but he doesn't really show me what to do if things go wrong -- and believe me, they do sometimes go wrong! Similarly with the section on iSCSI: the book tells me that I can set up authorization for iSCSI, but doesn't go into the details on how to do so.

In the OpenLDAP chapter, Sander says you set up replication of directories with slurpd, but doesn't show me how to do so, which is fine, because slurpd has been obsoleted from OpenLDAP! The chapter on Kerberos unfortunately doesn't explain how to store your Kerberos information in OpenLDAP -- a shame. The promising SAN and hearbeat sections show me how to set up a secure file system environment, but getting my OpenLDAP directory and authorization/authentication systems set up securely isn't covered.

Pro Ubuntu Server Administration is good for intermediate system administrators who want to get an enterprise-type server running fast. But don't forget, there is more to following quick instructions -- you want to be able to maintain the server. Hopefully a second edition will address those points.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, January 22, 2009

By 

Joseph Topjian (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Ubuntu Server Administration (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

Ubuntu Server Edition is a wonderful Linux distribution -- one of the last ones left to fit on a single CDROM. Out of the box, it provides no GUI and only the bare minimum services to boot up. So when you install it and see that blinking cursor, just what exactly can you do with Ubuntu Server? Pro Ubuntu Server Administration does a great job answering that question.

This book covers almost everything a System Administrator would want to do with Ubuntu Server: RAID, LVM, system management, clustering, file sharing, mail hosting, and security. It's crammed with commands and utilities you can follow along with to create a killer server. I especially enjoyed the clustering coverage. Not too many System Adminsitration books cover clustering at all. And while this book didn't nearly cover all aspects of clustering, it still gave you enough information to get a file share cluster up and running.

Oddly, this book did leave out services such as DNS and Web hosting, but the wealth of coverage in the other areas more than makes up for that. This is a highly recommended book to read for anyone working with, or is curious about, Ubuntu Server. You won't be disappointed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to Linux system administration not just for Ubuntu, January 9, 2009

By 

Rosenlof Jouni (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Ubuntu Server Administration (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)

This book gives excellent introduction to most painful administration headaches: performance issues, tuning and problem solving (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 14). I have over 10 years experience in Linux administration and consulting and found this book to give something you can use in every Linux architecture, not just in Ubuntu. I'm not that interested about how to configure different services, Internet is just full of that information, I want something to use in planning Linux systems and something to dig me out of problems (save my weekends). Although this book has several chapters covering configuration, I still think it's worth stars I gave and worth having in your bookshelf.