Automating UNIX and Linux Administration (The Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

by Kirk Bauer (Author)
Key Phrases: sticky options, sticky tag, sticky date, Red Hat Linux, System Monitoring, User Interfaces (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
From the creator of the popular open source projects AutoRpm and LogWatch comes a thorough and entertaining book. -- Slashdot.org

Product Description
The recommended audience is shown as "Intermediate-Advanced" and I would agree with that 100%…Administrators of larger networks will find this (book) relevant to their work.

<p>Wouldn't you like to automate the tedious daily tasks of system administration? <i> Automating UNIX and Linux Administration </i> will show you how, by exploring existing tools and offering real-world examples. Although some of the book is Linux-specific, most of the information applies to any UNIX system, including material on automating tasks across multiple variants of UNIX. Author Kirk Bauer briefly overviews tools and technologies&emdash;and assumes preliminary knowledge about editing a configuration file or mounting a file system. <p>

The techniques, methods, and tools in this book will help you manage a single system&emdash;but will prove especially powerful across multiple systems. No matter if the systems are desktops, servers, or Beowulf clusters&emdash;all of them will benefit from this automation. And managing five to five thousand systems will become a simpler task!

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Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Apress (September 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590592123
• ISBN-13: 978-1590592120
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #571,401 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #25 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Operating Systems > Unix > Administration
  #69 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Operating Systems > Linux > Networking & System Administration

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Automation - the easy way., October 6, 2003

By	Nick Downey (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

If you are disciple in the church of Wall, or like me you believe that laziness is the father of invention, or if you simply have more than a couple *nix machine to administer, Kirk Bauer's new book Automating Unix and Linux Administration is definitely for you. From the creator of the popular open source projects AutoRpm and LogWatch comes a thorough - and believe it or not entertaining - look at how one can leverage the power of a few common tools to significantly reduce the time and effort system administrators spend doing their jobs.

From the outset Bauer takes a straightforward and principled approach to problem analysis. Usually starting with anecdotal example scenarios (many of which will have you saying "been there before") and progressing through ideals, goals and consequences, he examines many of the common issues facing system administrators with candor and realism. Almost nowhere in the book does the author assume an authoritarian stance, he questions his own decision making process and encourages the reader to come up with exceptions to his rules. Fundamentally Bauer has one goal - to develop a comprehensive system for reliably automating the tedious but important tasks that all system administrators face on a recurring basis.

Admittedly, it would be a fallacy for any book to claim complete and comprehensive coverage of all things related to system administration and Bauer does no such thing. When the author touches on topics that obviously require more depth than a single chapter can afford, he is certain to include at least one reference (and in many instances more) to alternate publications without bias to any particular publisher or author. Having said that, the book's scope and depth of topic coverage is impressive. Starting with an exhaustive examination of SSH and progressing through cfengine, NFS, LDAP, RPM and Tripwire (just to name a few) Bauer provides carefully detailed instruction on how to automate tasks ranging from simple network management and software packaging to security, monitoring and backups. The author even goes so far as to suggest methods for efficiently front-ending automation systems for the less technical of users.

Although not expressly stated in the text, the overall theme of the book is walk on the shoulders of giants. Starting with simple example scripts (in both Bash and Perl) and many single-line commands, Bauer builds on the content of each previous chapter as the book progresses. Examples shown in early chapters are incorporated into more complex systems one step at a time. Following along is easy, each script or command is detailed on a line-by-line basis, and because of Bauer's principle-based approach the reader is rarely left wondering why the author has chosen a particular tool or implementation. More often than not the elegance of how Bauer pieces together methods and procedures will excite you about the possibilities for automation of your own systems.

Although Bauer explicitly states that readers are presumed to have more than a modicum of experience in system administration even the novice administrator, as well as those that are responsible for only a handful of machines, will find this book invaluable. Also included are three appendices which provide an easy introduction to basic shell tools, creating your own RedHat distribution and how to package software as RPM's. These portions of the book alone justify the less than $40 price tag, but for those that run clusters or data centers this book stands to save you countless hours of repetitive headaches. Published by apress and boasting nearly 600 pages this lively read has made itself a permanent addition to at least one reference library.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another must-have reference for unix admins!, September 26, 2003

By	D. Golden (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hot off the presses: I just received this book from Amazon yesterday. So far I've only read the introduction and the chapter on ssh and skimmed through the rest and it's fantastic! I'm not sure how much new stuff I expected when I ordered it, but it's already exceeding my expectations. I'm already finding out things I didn't never realized about ssh, and the side commentary on different ways of using ssh within scripts to administer across multiple machines is just sublime.

The author looks way beyond just slapping together some scripts to automate routine tasks, and presents some professional and robust approaches for automation, covering single machine administration, multiple machine and cluster administration, push/pull approaches, automation script propagation, automation dependencies, automated error state identification and correction, installation configuration, automating backup and recovery, and security. (Lots of discussion on security throughout -- it's clearly written for the real world.) Throughout, the author demonstrates nuances to each of these problems that show real thoughtfulness and mastery and teaches how to approach these issues equally thoughtfully and professionally yourself, rather than just offering a cookbook of scripts on different topics.

It's got me thinking about all the routine crud I do in totally new ways already. I already know I need to go back and re-read it slower to process it (and in front of a keyboard to try stuff out). This is definitely a book that will be on my "ready reference" shelf for a long time to come.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Should have been called "Cfengine", April 13, 2005

By	Ugo (Montreal) - See all my reviews

Most of the book is about Cfengine, so if you're only looking at automating tasks on 1-3 servers, you may end up using only 1/3 of the book. But I must say the content is relevant and well written.