Unix Systems Books

I've found this book to be a great introduction to Red Hat Linux. I've been using Linux on and off for the last few years, but I've only ever had a superficial understanding of it. This book was very useful in helping me figure out what's going on with Red Hat 7, including specifics on the boot sequence. The book also has good introductory chapters on Samba and Apache; enough to get you started at least.

I was new to Linux and had bought several books for reference. This is by far the book I used most. Kabir took me step by step in setting up my own Linux server in my home. I now have a Linix server acting as a Windows Domain, and am getting ready to deploy a Samba server for a client in order to avoid the costs associated with Windows software. He is exceptional in explaining how to get you up and going in practically all the services offered on a server. Good job Kabir!

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.

Although it is claimed that this 2nd edition has been updated for RH Linux v7.0 from v6.2, it doesn't show any updates using the GUI admin improvements included with RH Linux 7.0. The limits of GUI is Xwindows using Xfree86, tacked on in Chap 14.

Most of the install processes are the typical woefully inadequate, glossed-over, dated procedures for v6 through a command line. No showing of a typical server installation which is the main subject of book, but then the author has another book for Server 7, 0-7645-4786-0

There is no showing of the version of LinuxConf working under Gnome or KDE, what is in the book is text version of LinuxConf v1.19

Most of the rest of the book is CLI based commands for admin tasks includes network, dns, email, ftp, apache, and nfs. The Appendix has a 77 pg common command reference.

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.

This isn't the first book I have read that covers Unix file systems. All the standard Unix implementation (e.g., Bach (SVR2), McKusick et al (BSD)) and OS design books (e.g, Tanenbaum (Minux)) have something to say about file system design. But this book is different, in that it provides a broad yet focused coverage of a large number of Unix based file systems, starting back with the AT&T research edition as a foundation, and building upon the discussion with looks at Sun VFS, UFS, FFS, Minux, and Linux. The writing is detailed, and clear, and there is a good number of figures and code listings that help explain the concepts.

The best thing about the book, however, is the source code for a Linux filesystem named uxfs. Reading the text and studying the source code (in the book, or via download) really helps make the topics discussed in the book clear. The author does a decent job of describing the uxfs source code, and shares some tips on how to approach compiling a kernel, and the filesystem source, and using gdb to set breakpoints so that one can investigate how the Linux kernel is calling into the filesystem through all the major entry points. Even if you don't give a hoot about filesystem design, its a great example of how to understand a complex system that you might not otherwise have a clue how to approach -- set breakpoints on the major entry points, look at the stack, and then read the code up the stack to see what is going on. Understanding uxfs is a great start to understanding more complicated filesystems in Linux for sure, and less directly, other Unix-based file systems as well.

Along with uxfs the author provides a set of easy, and advanced exercises. The one that looks like the most fun to me is modifying uxfs to support an inode structure that uses direct, single indirect, double indirect, and triple indirect blocks (described in Maurice Bach's book and elsewhere).

In summary, if your basic operating system book's coverage of Unix filesystems is not enough, or you want a gentle and complete introduction to designing a Linux filesystem, consider reading this book.

This is a well-written overview of various Unix disk and network-based filesytems. It doesn't go into nearly the depth of, say, Vahalia, but it covers a great deal more, and in a more readable style. The diagrams and code snippets are usually well-chosen. I would agree with the reviewers who question the appropriateness of 'Implementation' in the title: there are better resources for that. But for this system administrator the book is very useful nonetheless.

I bought this book right before the Christmas and planned to spend some time on it during the holidays.

It turned out that I was completely absorbed in it, and spent days and nights on the book with my web-browser linked to a Linux kernel source code website. I simply couldn't stop it.

Even though the general study of UNIX file system could have been a little more comprehensive than what is provided, that information could be easily found in other resources (I recommend " UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers by Uresh Vahalia"). However, this book does stand out by the way it compares different implementations of varieties of UNIX kernels (Sys-V series, Solaris, etc. ) Given the open source of old UNIX systems which could be found on ([...]), this book adds great values when you case study the file-system architecture.

Another great perk you get from the book is the attached source code for a rather primitive but very instructive uxfs file system. By showing what interfaces a programmer needs to provide to Linux, the sample codes can be easily adapted to achieve your own goal smoothly and painlessly.

In sum, this is a very impressive book and I'm still studying it. For anyone who's fascinated with file-system or any UNIX system-level topics, this will be a very good choice.

I have to disagree with the "wannabe Linux filler book" another reviewer mentioned, it's a eye catching "sound bite" but in this instance it is not valid. The text is largely neutral with respect to specific flavours of platform and file system though obviously the author's experiences, source code availability and legal restrictions with respect to commercial products all play a part. Yes you can state that some reference texts are available from the Internet but the author has yet again made the subject accessible to a much larger audience through making the subject matter approachable in much the same way as he did with his book, "UNIX Internals." The example file system is written for Linux but that is a reasonable choice as it maximises accessibility for the reader.

The author obviously wants the reader to learn through experimentation and actively encourages this with a number of step by step examples that the reader can easily both repeat on their systems and use as a starting point for their own "what if?" experimentation on the subject matter.

Perhaps including a little more information on other current filesystems would make a good book better as mentioned in another review, but only if it provided the author with a starting point for taking the reader through examples of another filesystem feature, or perhaps an opportunity to compare and contrast solutions to a given design issue.

Including UNIX filesystem history was both interesting and helpful in as much as it provides a context through which the reader can understand why the introduction of features such as page cache, Sun's vnode layer etc were necessary or useful.

In summary, I found the book an interesting read and I was not disappointed with my purchase.

As the author claims, this book supplements other UNIX internals books, because they lack a thorough discussion on filesystems. For example, for a long time I've been puzzled by the pseudo code for read(2) system call in Maurice Bach's book. An inode lock is taken even for read() (Design of the UNIX Operating System, p.97) That doesn't sound right. ufs_inode.h on Solaris implies that ufs uses rwlock (multi-reader/single-writer lock; forget the modern concurrent direct I/O for now). Jim Mauro's "Solaris Internals" talks about rwlocks and filesystems in separate chapters but not in the same context. Here Steve's book tells us that filesystems didn't use rwlocks almost until the time SVR4 came out, and Bach's book was written before that. This is just one example of the mysteries Steve's book solved for me. I also like Steve's examples of using Solaris crash(1M). (I even collected them in a web page: rootshell.be/~yong321/computer/SolarisMdb.txt).

Superb technical details aside, this book is also written in good pedagogical style. Hands-on exercises always help. (How many people have read Goodheart's "Magic Garden" book for longer than a week?) Some code examples, pseudo or real, also help. Steve's book has both. Lastly, it comes with a mini-filesystem. I didn't test it but I believe it would help CS students tremendously.

Since the book is just much about Solaris as about Linux, I wish he talked more about Linux debugfs() and perhaps could use gdb to debug ext2 filesystems. I hope the new edition, if there is one, can give examples of Solaris mdb since crash is deprecated, and can expand the examples to include some new FSs, riserfs, Oracle's OCFS, etc. (Both have source code available to the public.) In chapters about cluster filesystems, the technical discussion seems to be less strong. There must be ways to debug these FSes just like using crash() and adb() to follow pointers in memory to debug UFS. It's just that cluster FSes are less understood and studied in this fashion.

Having been thrust into a position to migrate several high traffic servers from an older version of UnixWare to the newer version 7, this book was a very helpful guide for working through the process. The writing is clean and concise, the information is timely, and this book gets high marks from me as a good general reference guide.

Highly recomended for other SCO admins out there that may be in the process of a transition to version 7, or working in a UnixWare 7 environment.

This book is -a bit extended- hardcopy version of Unixware 7 online help. There is no in-depth knowledge. If you want to do disaster recovery or system tuning, you'll find nothing in this book. In this book, you may learn to add ppp interface, another ethernet card or disk and some other simple system management tasks which rarely works as it is said in the pages.

As a Canadian SCO instructor, I found this book a great supplement to our courses. Although it does not go into great detail on topics such as Shell Programming & Networking, it does cover most topics very well and relates concepts to Openserver concepts. Overall, I believe it to be a very well written book that may be useful for most everyone new to Unixware 7.

This book was written to help system administrators with migrating to and maintaining UnixWare 7. We tested everything we wrote about, detailing the bugs and their workarounds. The book has been given out by SCO at dozens of briefings. A large number of SCO engineers participated in verifying the information and supplying many of the tips. The book was not written to give detailed coverage of ancillary areas such as TCP/IP and Shell Programming. Those are separate areas (for instance, do you want Bourne Shell, Korn Shell, C Shell, etc). We also did not cover UnixWare internals or device drivers. Other authors are planning books in those areas.

Thank you for your interest in our book. Please email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions.

Gene Henriksen

I found Unixware 7 a great rescource that supplemented the Admin.2 section of Sco-Unix training. The combination of both, including Admin.1 and intro (of course) will get you the Sco C.U.S.A. exam. The concepts covered in Unixware 7 give the foundation of understanding that is necessary for administration. The rest is direct hands on ! Good job !

Finally - a product that allows for simultaneous booting of several operating systems.

I am absolutely very happy about this product. Not only does it allow me to do application software testing efficiently, but also allows me to practice for my Networking / MCP, MCSA certifications.

Now I won't have to build any more PCs - I can have a virtual laboratory using one PC.

We are using this as our textbook in the operating systems class I am currently taking although it's a user guide and not a textbook. VMWare is not that difficult and if you are computer literate, you won't need this. If you do want / need a VMWare reference, this is definitely the one to have.

1. It is just a manual, not a text book that you want to learn more.
2. I don't think we need to spend $28 to buy a manual. Too Much!!
3. Easy installation if you follow the instruction from the book.

When it comes to virtual computers installed on one physical computer nobody does it quite as well as VMWare. Version 5 of their workstation product is a significant improvement over earlier versions with easier installation, better discovery of available hardware, and many other features. While it is easy enough to install a basic system and the software pretty much installs itself the documentation of VMWare has always been lacking. This book fills that void by supplying a superb manual to match the superb software product. The author takes a kind of quick start approach as he goes through installation and upgrading, and then moves straight to creating a virtual machine so you can get working with it right away. From there he moves to some of the more advanced features such as working with snapshots, cloning a virtual machine, and working with teams. This is followed by a section on networking virtual machines, performance tuning, and optimization. He even includes an excellent section on tips and tricks. If you have the need for more than one operating system installed on your computer or just want to work with more than one then virtual machines is the easiest way to go about it. No rebooting and working in just one system at a time like a dual-boot configuration, you just run them both at once and switch back and forth as needed. And it will support more than just two virtual machines running at the same time. The VMWare Workstation 5 Handbook is highly recommended to anyone interested in the VMWare product.

The VMWare Workstation 5 Handbook (Networking & Security) (Paperback) by Steven S. Warren
ISBN: 1584503939
For someone who does not like to go through a lot of options and help pages to find the answer this book is a real time saver. Most users will find that this book covers all their queries and then some. The author strikes a right balance in satisfying both the dorks and the nerds amongst us with the depth and breath of the topics covered.
VMWare provides excellent online documentation but then why would one buy this book and why is this book so popular? The main reason is that the author has realised that people using VMWare have a very real need to learn to do things fast and be done with the installation and configuration and get on with testing their software in a distributed enviornment.
Steven S. Warren is a Senior Technical Consultant for The Ultimate Software Group and was named a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
I give this book 5 stars on a scale of 5, 5 being the highest. I strongly recommend this book.
Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP

This book is outstanding. Most books on Unix Administration start from the beginning, the beauty of this one is that it doesn't. This is a more advanced book designed for veteran administrators, or administrators looking for a move be junior administrator status to senior admin.

Bauer talks about the fundamentals behind automation, including state of mind and approach to automating different tasks. On top of that, he has great real-world examples that I am sure he has implemented on his servers. The book covers several topics and does it well. My favorite sections are the package management sections and the building RPMs sections. I have used those two throughout my time as a Unix Administrator in a large shop.

Each topic is covered in adequate depth, with enough information to get you started and working though solving problems. The book certainly is not a complete resource on monitoring, SSH, or backups or user management. Bauer makes the assumption that you have some background (maybe not much, but some) with all of these concepts.

When I meet good Unix Administrators who want to become great, I recommend this book. This is the type of book that will be looked periodically as a reference guide, after its initial reading.

This is a good book for everyone that want to go a little bit deeper in the Linux Adminstration. In Linux distributions we often find differents solutions to address the same problem. The book can save hours deciding between using solution A or B. It include and overview of the most often used solutions with the pro and cons in some cases. For example: NFS, AFS, Coda and others.

All the time the author has the security in mind and this is important for people trying to set boxes on the Internet.

If you have a UNIX background that not used for a long time (10 years or so) and you need to go into the Linux server administration. This book certainly will save you a lot of time and will give you the bases to go deeper in the topics that are more important to you.

If the above if not your case, I think the book is still a worth too. I will help to understand the pitfalls in Linux administrations a bit deeper.

At least, but no less important, I found the book easy to read.

If you do *ANY* Unix/Linux system administration (from just maintaining your own desktop machine on up to the big-time), and automating some (or most) aspects of UNIX/Linux system administration sounds at all interesting to you, then stop wasting your time reading this review, and *IMMEDIATELY* go purchase this book! Really!

OK. If you are still reading, then either you don't do *any* UNIX/Linux system administration (in which case: Why *are* you reading this?), or you aren't quite sold. Let me tell you: This book is among a truly rare breed---just bursting with quality and value! (This book is an absolute *steal*; its a bargain at twice the price!) I'm a bit of a Linux and Perl book nut; I have so many O'Reilly books on my bookshelf that I have a better selection than my local Borders! AULA's publisher is a new one for me, but I think that they got an author---and a book---that O'Reilly would *kill* for!

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure: I'm not a professional Sys-Ad, but I do administer my own small network of Linux machines that I use in my technical business. Oh, and I'd never heard of Kirk Bauer before reading this book (although I did know about a quality piece of open-source software called LogWatch---I just didn't know that Kirk Bauer was its author too).

Automating UNIX and Linux Administration (AULA) is a genuinely *outstanding* UNIX/Linux system-administration book! I have read, re-read, and re-re-read *most* of the book! AULA is truly worth its weight in platinum! It is a rare and wonderful thing to start reading a computer/technical book and realize that it is of monumental significance, something that you *know* will be of enormous value! A "_this_changes_everything_" moment! In my personal programming library, AULA occupies prime real estate---and I would say that it shares the "WOW" factor with only a few of my other favorites:

Linux Administration Handbook
Evi Nemeth, et al., 2002, Prentice Hall PTR

Linux Server Hacks
Rob Flickenger, 2003, O'Reilly

Linux Shell Scripting with Bash
Ken O. Burtch, 2004 Sams Publishing (Developers Library)

And of value to Perl hackers:

Perl for System Administration
David N. Blank-Edelman, 2000, O'Reilly

Perl Cookbook
Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, 2000, O'Reilly

If Kirk Bauer ever publishes any other materials on Linux administration, I'll buy them on the basis of the title (and his name) alone---I have no need for any more information! This is clearly a guy who *knows* what valuable information is, and has the technical savvy to save you years (decades?) of trial-and-error experience. AULA is packed with unique insight and a source of information that cannot be found anywhere else! Do yourself a *big* favor---buy this book now!

I see that most of the reviewers didn't like this as much as I did. That may be because they are home users or have small networks - I think this is very useful for the admins of larger systems (though it may not be useful for VERY large systems).

Or it may be that the subject matter is too dry. Sure, this can be a boring subject, but isn't that the point? System administration is often boring, and particularly so if you haven't automated it. Making global changes isn't exciting, but it is something some of us have to do now and then.

I'm surprised that it averages two stars - I think it is better than that. When I first get a technical book, I flip to a few random pages - I'm looking to see if I find things I didn't already know and if things are well explained. I found a LOT of things I was not previously aware of and I thought the coverage was thorough.

I agree that it has a strong Linux slant, but I don't see that as a problem - most of what this book suggests could be translated to any system.

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.

I am a programmer by trade, but don't have much experience with the server management side of IT. I have had scares with backups for my home PCs. Finally I decided to do something about it with this book. A few days of reading gave me a great deal of knowledge. The final solution I decided on was BackupPC, which is now automatically backing up 7 PCs in our house, every night. My stress level has been reduced completely. Worth the price many times over.

W. Curtis Preston is the king of backups, and his book Backup and Recovery (BAR) is easily the best book available on the subject. Preston makes many good decisions in this book, covering open source projects and considerations for commercial solutions. Tool discussions are accompanied by sound advice and plenty of short war stories. If the author addresses the few concerns I have in his next edition, that should be a five star book.

The best aspect of BAR is the author's obvious expertise in this subject. He does a good job sharing lots of his knowledge with the reader. Probably the most valuable conceptual framework I learned in BAR is the difference between backups and archives. Pages 696-7 summarize this nicely: "Backups are the secondary copy of primary data... Archives are the primary copy of secondary data." In this section and elsewhere, Preston describes how archives are the repository one should create when answering ediscovery requests and similar queries -- not backups. This is an extremely powerful idea and I plan to see how my employer deals with this issue.

The second best aspect of BAR involves multiple chapters on backing up various databases. One can usually find similar coverage in single books on specific databases, but having all information in one book is useful for purposes of comparison. Chapter 15 provides an overview of the entire problem by discussing terminology and features found in many databases. This chapter helps storage admins understand the database admin world. Of particular note was the coverage of Microsoft Exchange, which the book calls a specialized database. I had not thought of Exchange in this light, but it's true -- especially when Microsoft indicates future versions will have SQL Server replacing Extensible Storage Engine. I only read chapters on SQL Server, Exchange, and MySQL.

The third best aspect of BAR includes OS-specific chapters on bare-metal recovery. Although my OS of choice (FreeBSD) didn't merit its own chapter, I felt the material in the bare-metal section was robust enough to help me perform this work if necessary. I really only read the chapters on Windows/Linux and ignored Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS X.

BAR is a good book, so why not five stars? First, I thought the chapters on open source backup options (especially ch 7 on "Open-Source Near CDP") were weak. I wanted to learn a lot more about rdiff-backup, for example, but the tool merited about 5 pages and introduced only the simplest possible invocation. Rsnapshot was also undercovered. It seemed like too many pages were spent on utilities I would probably never use (given newer options) like dump and cpio. I was also not confident I could get very far with Amanda, BackupPC, or Bacula given the detail given to each open source product. (Regarding BackupPC -- I had to guess it was open source and then only found out the truth when its Web site at sf.net was mentioned late in the chapter!)

Second, some topics never really made sense. For example, I still do not understand how snapshots actually work. Calling it a "picture" means nothing to me. Snapshots are mentioned throughout the text, and the explanation that finally appears near the end of the book in a miscellanea chapter doesn't help.

Third, I would really have liked to hear more about services offering backup to the Internet, like Amazon's S3 and others. This MUST be covered in the next edition.

Finally, although the book has lots of advice, it would have been nice to have had a case study chapter where multiple example enterprises demonstrate their backup and recovery solutions. After finishing the book I have lots of ideas floating around, but seeing how a one-person, 100-person, 10,000-person, and 500,000-person environment implement BAR would be greatly appreciated.

Short Summary:
This book's does not only teaches you have to create safe backup but it takes you to the next level where a large organization can save tons of dollars a year by making their backup and restore faster and more reliable process.

Detail Summary:
Backup and Recovery is the most interesting subject to me. I have always enjoyed reading and writing about this subject. I personally believe that without proper backup and ability to restore the backup to recover the system to original state, any organization is at great risk. Biggest change in the recent industry has been the proliferation of Windows, Exchange and SQL Server.

This book is aimed at the people who feel that the commercial software precuts aren't meeting all their needs. Almost everything which is discussed in this book is either included with operating system or application. This book vastly covers the tools which are open-source projects. This book covers how to back up and recover everything from a basic Linux, Windows, or Max OS workstation to a complicated DB2, Oracle, Sybase or SQL Server (my favorite) databases as well many other things.

This book suggests tools which are less than $100 or in most of the cases almost free. This book is for every developer or system administrator. This book tells users how exactly to choose which backup tool is best. This book stays away from ever changing product names. It focuses on concepts only - what a novel approach! I appreciate author for the same.

This book focuses on two people mainly - Database Administrators (DBA) and System Administrator (SA). Concepts for both the roles are explained in detail in this book. In author's own word "I explained the backup utilities in plain language so that any DBA can understand them, and I explain database architecture in such a way that an SA, even one who has never before seen a database, can understand it."

A book on Backup and Recovery are incomplete without discussing Bare-Metal Recovery. When operating system disk is lost and it is needed to recovered, it is called Bare-Metal Recovery. Out of hundreds of way to recover, this book focuses on best ways for Bare-Metal Recovery.

Working as SQL Server Principal Database Administrator, I have been involved with Database Backup since day one. In several years of my career, I have seen many large organizations ignoring backup of master database. I was very glad when I see in just three lines author has conveyed clear message about master database. These three lines explain the understanding of author for SQL Server.

"It is extremely important to backup the master database on regular basis. This database holds all the configuration information for the running system as well as all the configuration information for all databases and other information such as logon accounts. Without this database, the rest of the system is useless!"

Rating: 4 and 1/2 stars

In Summary, Backup and Recovery is not everything. This book takes you to highest level of the backup and recovery at conceptually strong working examples.

Pinal Dave
Principal Database Administrator
(blog.sqlauthority.com)

In the realm of important things in the world of computers are good backups and equally important is the ability to properly restore those backups. My initial attraction to this book had to do with it being tapered toward open system solutions. I am an avid user of Linux and open-source software, so I was interesting in learning about the free tools that the author writes about.

The author starts out by discussing "The Philosophy of Backup" which covers why backups are so important and how you to find a solution that both meets your needs and your budget. Chapter two goes over what to backup, how often and at what levels. It also discussed what types of disaster to be prepared for, automation, storage, testing and things to look out for on various OS's.

Chapters 3-7 cover open-source backup utilities. In chapter three the author discusses and provides examples of how to use basic utilities such as dump, cpio, tar and dd for Unix systems, ntbackup and System Restore for the Window's crowd, ditto for Mac, and the GNU versions of tar, cpio, and rsync. Chapter's 4-6 discuss Amanda, BackupPC and Bacula. Chapter seven digs into near-continuous data protection and how the open-source community is achieving this, and what tools to use.

By chapter 8 and 9 the author is discussing commercial backup solutions. This section is different from the last in that it doesn't really discuss specific tools and how to use them, but rather it discusses the features of commercial products. This section also covers the various types of backup hardware on the market in an effort to help the reader decide what media best meets their needs.

Chapters 10-14 covers "Bare-Metal Recovery". The author takes you through the process of a bare-metal recovery with Solaris, Linux, Windows, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS X.

By chapters 15-22 the author has moved on to database backups and takes you through the various solutions for Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2, SQL Server, Exchange, PostegreSQL, and MySQL. Finally the author wraps up the book with VMware server backup solutions and discussing data protection.

CONCLUSION
--
I found this book to be a very interesting read. I especially enjoyed the open-source, bare-metal recovery, and database sections. The author does an excellent job of taking the reader through all of the steps including example syntax needed to perform a backup and restore with the various tools discussed. Another high point is that the author includes current tools and techniques. This book holds lots of real world wisdom and I would recommend it to any system administrator, developer, or user who is interested in protecting their data.

I have used many backup utilities in linux, Unix, Windows, and found this book to be only a very basic view of the backup, DR realm.

This book takes the fairly complicated matter of configuring Nagios for monitoring your network infrastructure and makes it straight forward. Kudos and many things to Mr. Josephsen.

The author clearly likes the product on the products own merits. The books is not written by a hack who was filling a void. He writes clearly and methodically explaining in detail why, what, how and when of Nagios. The index is very good and has allowed me to effectively use it as a reference in learning Nagios. I like some humor in my technical books and David does not disappoint me when he explains how to "ssh into his power strip" to do a little environmental monitoring.

Nagios - in my opinion - is a killer-app with such flexibility as to be the "ultimate" monitoring tool. Learning it is a wise investment of anyone's time, and Josephesen's book is invaluable to understanding and exploiting all of Nagios's features... and yes, I am over the age of 13.

I use Nagios heavily at my company and as a result, I've purchased all of the available texts on the subject. This one is simply the best work on Nagios available right now. It's clear and succinct where even the online docs from the Nagios project can be confusing. It covers things that the No Starch volume barely touches on (WMI Scripting and Nagios) and honestly, the diagrams and code samples are clear and useful in real-world application.

Really, buy this one. If you need another one, I would be surprised.

It's well written, but it didn't provide much more insights and coverage than reading the existing documentation you can download for free. There are also some glaring gaps in its coverage. There's nothing about passive checks! And I don't think it was written before v3.0 came out.

If you like written docs for stuff you reference often, it will be worth the money. But don't go to it with any significant troubleshooting problem.

Main benefit of this book is that it will teach you many things in a short time. You might want to purchase it if you want a quick start on Nagios, and don't plan to use Nagios on larger systems. Also, although the author's (brief?) style has some benefits, it also has some drawbacks.

Things like distributed monitoring, fail-over, passive checks,... are barely touched. If you are installing Nagios for the first time, you probably won't miss these subjects elaborated, because you will want to have it running soon as possible. However, I think the Apress book covers these advanced topics much better, and gives a more comprehensive overview of Nagios. The decision is up to you. I preferred the lengthier book with more things explained, although it was a bit harder to read.

One more thing that I disliked was that for Passive checks author references Chapter 2. I couldn't find anything about passive checks there, so I checked the Index. No mention of them there either. I gave this book a relatively bad review due to this kind of unclear issues and for the lack of distributed monitoring and failover coverage, which I think is very important for a monitoring system in a serious installation.

As said, some things are better in this book than in Apress one (like ie. Windows check explanation), but in general, Apress book left a better impression on me.

This book is perfect for anyone who needs to write application software for GNU/Linux. It describes all those miscellaneous features for programming that are above the kernel but below the level of integrated development environments. It describes makefiles, gcc, debugging, object file analysis, sockets, pthreads, performance analysis and much more. The latest edition also has an excellent overview of virtualization.

The author doesn't go into detail on any one subject, and that is what makes the book so good. I can find details in various online sources. This book is perfect for someone who had normal training in C/C++ and now needs to understand how to develop on a GNU/Linux system.

I've been programming for a good while but I am relatively new to Linux. Sure I've flirted with it a little in the past but I've mostly been down in the worlds of Nulceus, vxworks, and threadx.

I found myself needing to come up to speed fast on a lot of little things - multi threading, communications, piping and build processes. This book covers it all in good enough detail to get you on your feet fast. The sections on signals was especially helpful as was the nice overview of gdb which while not the debugger type I'm used to - really proved to me how useful that old program still is (and since I'm stuck with the command line version of it - how to really make that version sing).

As a quick reference/introduction this book can't be beat. Highly recommended

This book covers a wide breadth of what you need to get started with Linux programming. The writing is very good and readable.

The examples though simple, are very clear and concise, and makes you understand at a fundamental level what elements of Linux you need to know.
The ones I liked in particular were:
- IPC (interprocess communication)
- Linux process model, and pThreads
- shell scripting, awk, sed
- bison, flex
- tools like GDB (debugger), gprof (performance), gcov (code coverage)
- sockets programming

Note that this book does not go very deep into these topics, but if you need a refresher on the basics, or you don't know a particular area of linux, this book is highly recommended.

Most of the examples are in C, as expected, (being Linux) except for a very short example in Ruby with Sockets programing.

Bought this book as it had so many good reviews on Amazon.com. I really should have paid more attention to the one review that said "Disappointing" (Paul Floyd of Grenoble, France).

I haven't yet read the bits about history, tools or shell scripting. What I have read is the section covering application development. This skims through areas such as sockets, threading, semaphores, mutexes, message queues, memory-mapped files etc. All useful areas, but this book does little more than tell you what the man pages tell you. That's where the first bit of lazy authoring comes in. The second bit of lazy authoring is the complete absence of an explanation of how to use these areas together, or an example of using them together. Given the list of topics, an example would have been useful that starts a worker thread to handle a TCP connection, that thread waiting on file descriptors and a timeout using select or poll, using mutexes to protect data, a message queue to communicate between the main thread and the worker thread, and possibly a memory-mapped file to create a circular log of the last N actions performed. Unfortunately the author didn't attempt that. But we should possibly consider ourselves lucky that he didn't, as the example code he does provide contains some major failings, most notably putting code inside assertions that is required even in optimised release builds. When this code gets compiled out in an optimised release build the examples fail. Obvious to anyone that knows about assertions, but not necessarily to everyone reading the book.

Looks like I'm going to break the mould of giving five star reviews to this book.

Part I is a brief overview of the history and motivation behind Linux. No bones there.

Part II covers compiler and related tools. I learnt a few things from these chapters (I wasn't familiar with either autotools or gcov).

Part III covers application development. The emphasis is mainly on IPC. There are some grim errors in the code. In particular, I winced when I saw the use of asserts that contained statements performing actions with (necessary!) side-effects. Compiled in optimized mode in most environments, this code will crash. For this section, Stevens/Rago APUE or Rochkind AUP serve much better.

Part IV, shell scripts and tools is OK, as is part V, debug/test.

I'm not sure why there's a CD included. It contains the source code (of little value, easily downloaded) and all of the diagrams used in the book. I can't imagine that they will ever come in handy.

This is another book that implies it's for power users, yet most of what's in here can be found in any garden variety book on how to run Linux. Only part of this book is aimed at "geeks".

The promotional text on the back cover implies that it's aimed at sysadmins. And while *some* of it is, most of it is stuff that a system administrator would already be familiar with.

Much of what's in this book is the same stuff aimed at beginning to intermediate Linux desktop users. It's not for real "geeks" or sysadmins by any means.

If only the truly useful stuff for sysadmins/geeks were included, the book would be 1/3 it's size.

It's not that it's a bad book; it's just not marketed well at all and has a very misleading title.

I found it a complete waste of money. It's hard to find books for "intermediate to advanced" users. I figured this would be one of them. It's not.

I was quite disappointed.

Are you annoyed from time to time that you can't find the right hardware; or can't configure a server; or are supporting less experienced users? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Michael Jang, has done an outstanding job of writing a cool book that addresses many of the more common complaints faced by the experienced Linux user.

Jang, begins by providing you solutions for some of the everyday annoyances. Then, the author gives some tips for the less experienced users. Next, the author shows you how to make Internet access as convenient and simple as possible for regular users. He also provides solutions for the geek who needs to set up regular users with access to popular tools, such as PDF files, MP3 players, and Windows-based applications. The author continues by showing the geek how to make choices in hardware, distributions, and systems that are appropriate for his or her users. Then, he shows the geek how to optimize Linux, solve some annoying boot issues, and address some basic security concerns. Next, the author focuses primarily on those kernal-related tasks that make most Linux users look to the geek for help. He then focuses on a variety of annoyances related to keeping your systems running smoothly and up-to-date. The author continues by showing you how to select and configure servers to solve a variety of problems, with a higher degree of security. Then, he focuses on annoyances created by and associated with the presence of different kinds of users in an organization. Finally, the author provides solutions for a wide variety of other annoyances related to system administration.

This most excellent book shows you how to get a stubborn wireless card to work under Linux. Perhaps more importantly, it reveals little-known sources for wireless drivers and information.

The book is a valuable reference text that may help to identify and repair many problems on the desktop or server. Linux professionals responsible for the operation and maintenance of desktop computers and servers will benefit most from the wide range of solutions provided for common problems. Semi-geeky Linux users may enjoy an informative look under the hood of Linux, even if they have low expectations of making the repairs themselves. Non-geeks, who just want to use Linux, are best off with Linux for Non-Geeks by Rickford Grant, published by No Starch Press, affiliated with O'Reilly.

Linux is a great operating system but like every other one it has some annoyances that may crop up from time to time. The purpose of this book is to help the reader to get Linux to work the way they want it to without getting annoyed in the process. As such the target audience is the Linux power user and system administrators.

Some of the areas covered include configuring GNOME applications in KDE and configuring KDE applications in GNOME, X Window configuration, working with CDs and DVDs, configuring sound, converting from Outlook, interfacing with various Instant Messaging programs, working with Microsoft Office documents, multimedia, hardware issues, startup problems, system maintenance, CUPS printing, using Samba, and various administrative tasks. One of the really great features of the book is that the author provides the details of how to make the changes in each of the most common distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian. So you know right away how to do it in the particular distribution you are working with. This is one of the things that really sets this book apart from others in this category and makes it one of the best choices possible.

Linux Annoyances for Geeks is an excellent book that details step-by-step how to work through the annoyances and get the results you want. With easy to follow the steps and the correct results every time it is a highly recommended resource.

This book isn't for a beginners but for those who already have experience with linux. I consider myself a moderate geek. Although the book doesn't explain everything in detail, it does have good references to other links that go into detail. For examples it explains how to install kerberos, but doesn't go into much detail on the hows or whys. I like the fact that it's not a bible!!!. It's pretty up to date on distros, SuSE 9.3-10, Debain Sarge, Fedora/RHEL 4. I consider this book a wrapping of all the google and forum anwsers I have been looking for. Overall I enjoyed the book.

Everything you need to know about v.1.3, but with Apache 2.0 just around the corner (currently in beta), you might want to hold off until the 2nd edition. This edition touches very briefly on 2.0, providing a general overview of what to expect, but no meat. A lot remains the same, but some critical things are different, and clear documentation of the kind that this book provides for 1.3 is scant. Hopefully something will come out before too long fill the void.

Of course, Apache 1.x is no slouch, has the majority share of servers on the web currently, could be all you need and more. If you're inclined towards the tried, tested, and true, and shun the unproven, consider this a 5 star recommendation for an excellent book on an excellent, if somewhat venerable, web server.

There is a lot of good information contained in this book just waiting to get out. Unfortunately, the poor chapter organisation and the abyssmal index makes finding the information you need (or trying to find it later) a frustrating experience. There's also a lot of padding with CGI and PHP scripts that didn't seem to serve any purpose unless you really wanted to learn how to program 'hello world'. Overall, it will teach you the gist of administrating an Apache Web Server, but I found it disappointing.

You can't go wrong with this book if you need a reference book concerning Linux and Apache Web Server Administration.

Author Aulds has a way with words, and he makes the subject easy to digest mixed with a dose of magical clarity. He is up to date, and this book covers besides Perl and CGI, PHP. Good selection of examples which anyone can use in everyday Apache Web administration shows the author's vast experience which is tempered with an equal amount of theorectical expertise.

Highly recommended.

Having spent a great deal of time wrestling with the more arcane aspects of administering a web server I've read way too much about the Apache server.

This may well be the one book written about Apache that turns into a must buy. It covers earlier in the learning curve and has much better prose than Kabir's "Apache Server Administrator's Handbook" and covers more than Laurie's "Apache: The Definitive Guide". While the sections on Perl, PHP and CGI are not extensive they cover all an Apache administrator needs to know to support the programming efforts of others. I found the sections on troubleshooting and security particularly useful.

I had already compiled Apache from source a number of times so cannot really tell how useful this section might be to the newcomer but it seems to cover everything you need to know to custom build your own httpd binary from source.

The section on configuring Apache is marvellous, I learn something from it every time I open it to assist in reconfiguring a server.

This book is well written, up to date, concise and authoratitive. It has good examples, good explanations and leaves out almost nothing. Everything a computer book should be. I feel that anyone who is starting down the Apache road should buy this book, any real need for earlier information is adequately addressed by the Apache manual while no other volume covers so much of the rest you need to know as well.

Excellent instructions, and an amazing companion to the O' Reiley book. Takes the guesswork out of Linux Apache admin, and is a handy tool for any other Unix folks as well.

It's so nice to read a technical book that is accurate and in English not geek.