Bob Uhl writes: "I've just finished reading O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux
System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer's copy).
Bottom line up front: it's a handy introduction for the beginner
GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's
bookshelf.
The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration
tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing,
high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the
chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're
enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and
headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases
the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the
material presented. I've been working with Apache for almost a decade
now, but I've not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have
played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving
with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.
I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux
'administration' books focus on GUI tools — I've seen some which don't
even bother addressing the command line! I've long said that if one
isn't intimately familiar with the shell — if one cannot get one's job
done with it — then one isn't really a sysadmin. Linux System
Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the
get-go. Kudos!
The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace
Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there's very, very little reason to use
Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don't.
Postfix is more stable and far more secure.
Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware;
Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and
so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux
in particular is choice — it's good to see a reference work which
implicitly acknowledges that.
The authors are also pretty good about calling out common
pitfalls — several got me, once upon a time. It'd have been nice to have
had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth...
Lastly, I liked that the authors & their editor weren't afraid to refer
readers to books from other publishers, in addition to O'Reilly's
(uniformly excellent) offerings. Not all publishers would be so
forthright; O'Reilly merits recognition for their openness.
The book's not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at
least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster
in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn't actually need to
register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these
are pretty minor quibbles.
I'd say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium
business admin who'd like to start using Linux, or who already is but
doesn't really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at
least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will
probably find some useful stuff in here."