Red Hat Linux Administrator's Handbook

by Mohammed J. Kabir

This shop manual for installing, configuring and troubleshooting Red Hat Linux 7.0 is written for the experienced network administrator and is designed to provide "just in time" instructions for solving immediate, specific problems.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764547976
• ISBN13: 9780764547973
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 648 Pages
• Weight: 1.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Intermediate to Advanced / Solid Book

If your running RH7 or you already know how to move around and edit files in linux, this will be a good book.However, I have determined that it is impossible to have "the know all" book on linux admin. The subject is just too large for one book. This book will come in useful for its purpose, administering a RH server. But to cover it all you must buy other books like The UNIX System Administration Handbook, A good Sendmail book, a good Apache Server book (I don't recommend O'Reilly's Definite Guide). You will also need a good Linux security book and some sort of command line reference book like O'Reilly's "Linux in a Nutshell".If you are a beginner, you will need this book and eventually all the others I have mentioned, but you MUST have another book to help you along. If Coriolis ever publishes an up to date RH7 version of "Setting Up a Linux Internet Server Visual Black Book", then it would make a great pair. Even the old version of the Visual Black Book will still help the beginner just fine but it's always good to have the latest.Linux is free but learning it will cost you. Go ahead and get the book then go get all the other books.

Quick and to the Point

I was upgrading an older Red Hat installation to 7.1 and needed some quick and directed guidance to configuration files whose locations and formats have changed. This is the only book I found that spent it's time doing that and didn't waste the first 400 pages on "Why Linux is good and what this whole open source thing is about."An unusually high signal to noise ratio.

Sweet-Spot of RedHat Handbooks

Best of the RedHat handbook tomes. If you're not a complete beginner but just need a little shove in the right direction this is the book. Kabir strikes the right balance between full explanation and how-to, providing work-arounds and shortcuts while explaining any consequences. Kudos as well to IDG. The size of the book and typefaces are perfect; the few screenshots are clear, appropriate and do not litter every other page. Very few typos, nice overall design.

Paves the way to Linux guru-dom

This book not only tells you the things you can do to adminster your Red Hat Linux box (I actually use the book for Mandrake, based on Red Hat), but it tells you the things you SHOULD do. It also tells you about all the little utilities you can use instead of having to manually edit a bunch of scripts.For instance, I learned how to use "ntsysv" to configure services, such as httpd, to run on start up. The book also devotes 25 of its 600 pages to user management, and another 100 to Apache administration, which are vital topics if you want to run Red Hat as a web server.If you need just one book on Red Hat Linux admistration (NOT installation), at this price, and based on reviews I've seen on other such books on this site, this book is far and away the best value.

Just what the author said...

Nuts and bolts information only. No frills, no fluff nor are there tutorials that are so unrealistic to real world applications. The author does an excellent job of getting to the point and explaining features of Red Hat 6.1 quickly and concisely. Usually, the Red Hat webpage has the answers to most questions when you can filter out the useless fluff to find the information you need. Since searching Red Hat's webpage for answers to your questions now yields more useless discussion forum questions of someone who wants to install the latest peripherials on yesterday's hardware, yesterday's kernel, and yesterday's Red Hat version 2 than meat to solve problems at hand, I bought this book to be quicker and more efficent to find the information I need to use for daily administration of the Red Hat servers I maintain at work to keep co-workers, management, and customer's happy. Even though this book talks about the X-Windows, the author discusses how to do all features and functions in text / prompt mode which is good for those like me who do not use X windows in order to get more hard drive space and faster CPU performance. A little DOS / Unix experience is recomended and makes this book even more powewrful as a reference tool. But if you are getting started, this book, along with Red Hat's webpage and the ability to filter out fluff at Red Hat's search engine, will help you understand and work Red Hat Linux.