The Practice of System and Network Administration

by Strata R. Chalup, Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan

Book Overview

With 28 new chapters, the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration innovates yet again! Revised with thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback, this... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201702711
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 774 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.5" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

A Mentor in a Book

The book market is flooded with books that will tell you all about the technical details of administering various software products and operating systems. Their scope is usually limited to whatever technical product is being written about and they become outdated as quickly as the technology becomes outdated. This book is very different. It gives guidelines in a very readable, coaching style, that can be applied to many different aspects of the System Administration trade. I have been a System Administrator for a few years now, but this book clarifies many of the issues that I work with daily. It's like a having a mentor on my bookshelf that I can pull down and consult for advice. I especially like the whole section of seven chapters dealing with different aspects of management. These chapters should be mandatory reading for every SA -- and their bosses. The book is written in a very readable style and has many useful and insightful real-world examples that show that the authors have been around and learned a lot on the way. The book is worth reading just for these examples. I read the book from cover to cover. I first heard about this book when I attended a seminar Tom Limoncelli taught at the 2003 LISA conference titled "Time Management for System Administrators: How to Keep from Going (More) Crazy". Many of the topics in the seminar are covered in detail in the book. If you're a system administrator, you should read this book.

A book without implementation details, but hard to beat

"The Practice of System and Network Administration" (TPOSANA) sat on my shelf for nearly a year before I read it. I wish now I'd read it a year ago! It's rare to find a book useful to both Windows and UNIX system administrators, but rarer still to read one designed to improve one's career and attitude.TPOSANA is a 'framework' book. It teaches you how to think and leaves out the implementation details. System administration isn't all about man pages and tech books. The authors' principles -- simplicity, clarity, generality, automation, communication, and basics first -- will make a good sys admin great and a great sys admin extraordinary.Others have outlined the TPOSANA contents, so I'll share my favorite aspects of the book. The writing is lively and witty, with memory-jogging conclusions nicely summarizing each chapter's contents. The text is filled with dozens of applicable and informative case studies. Finally, the authors devote seven chapters to fundamental management and personal attitude issues, showing they know people and processes matter as much as products. I highly recommend TPOSANA. The sad irony is those most needing to read this book will push it aside, as I initally did. Those who take the time to read it will be glad they did. Anyone acting in a technical capacity -- sys admins, engineers, and programmers -- will find it enlightening and entertaining.

Moving from "Good" to "Great" in your sysadmin career

Good sysadmins know the technical details. They can resurrect a dead server, understand the intricacies of sendmail or the Windows registry, and recite all of the types of DNS records by heart. They own copies of the UNIX System Administration Handbook and refer to them regularly. They are good sysadmins, and will contribute solidly at an intermediate level.Great sysadmins know all of that and what is in this book. They are the ones who go on to become the senior sysadmins and consultants, have fabulous careers, and are respected by their bosses, co-workers, and customers.There is much more to a technical job than simply the technical skills. Don't buy this book to learn how to run a system or you will be disappointed. Do, however, buy it to learn how to be an effective professional systems administrator.It is also useful for a manager of sysadmins who is either non-technical, or has never been a sysadmin himself, as it is a good introduction to the issues and concerns that sysadmins need to face.Limoncelli and Hogan cover many topics, including: - Trouble ticket systems - Desktops and Servers (how they're the same, differ, etc.) - Administrative networks (why bother?) - Requirements (gathering, tracking, etc.) - Standards and centralization of services - How to do debugging (not "you see this problem, do this" but rather learning the process of doing good debugging) - Fix things once, not over and over again - Security policies (including management and organizational issues for a variety of organizational profiles) - Disaster Recovery (again, not how to backup data, but why you'd want to, legal issues, etc.) - Systems Administration Ethics - Change management and revision control - Maintenance windows: what they are and why they're good for both you and your users - Centralization versus Decentralization - Helpdesks: sizing, scope, processes, escalation, etc. - Data centers (many physical facility concerns that sysadmins don't often think of, including how to move a datacenter) - Managing non-OS software (commercial and free)They will help you answer questions like - Does server hardware really cost more? Do we go with a few expensive servers or many cheap ones? - What does "redundancy" actually mean? - Why would we spend money on backups? There's never been an outage... - What do I do when asked to do something illegal? - How do I communicate and schedule large system changes? - How do I do a safe server upgrade? - They want to decentralize the sysadmin group -- what do we do? - How do we move our datacenter? - What sort of policy issues are there with email? - How do I deal with my customers abusing printers? - What do we have to worry about if we're implementing remote access (e.g. dialup modem banks) for our users?Finally, they close with an entire section on Management: - How to deal with cost centers, management chains, hiring, customer support, and outsourcing. - How to m

A must have for any sysadmin, regardless of skill level

As a UNIX sysadmin veteran, I wish this book had been around when I started out. It would have saved so many headaches as I "learned the hard way."Though not a nitty gritty technical book, this one is a must have for every sysadmin, regardless of skill level or the technology s/he uses. For the novice admin, it offers a good big picture look at the most important "whys" of system administration. For the intermediate admin, it has great advice on how to balance fire fighting with project work that will lessen the need for the fire fighting. For the senior admin, there are gems of design wisdom and sections on how to deal with being in a managerial or team leader role. Because it's more high level, this book is even a good buy for people who manage sysadmins but are not themselves technical.The chapters are conveniently split into the "basics" and the "icing," depending on the skill of the reader and the state of the reader's work environment. The authors back up their sound advice with real world case studies and personal experiences. Best of all, not only was it a good read cover to cover, it's organized so that the reader can come back to it as a reference later.Kudos to Tom and Christine for writing an excellent book, one which I will certainly be recommending to my clients and colleagues!

Excellent book for Sysadmin career development

I am very impressed by this book. I've been a Unix sysadminfor more than 10 years and this is the best book I have read forexplaining and demonstrating basic and advanced principlesof system administration. And it goes beyond administrationof any particular OS or system type. You could apply thisto your work architecting, supporting, implementing oradministering any computer or network service.I have many technical books. I do not read them all coverto cover. But I will completely devour this one. I work on a team of 18 (already excellent!) Unix sysadmins. I would love to have every team member read this book -- our team would be better for it.you may especially enjoy the section on sysadmin salary negotiations.