Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

Nice, easy-to-read guide for setting up reliable Sun systems. Chapter 4 on networks was nicely done - compressed a whole textbook into one chapter.

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

I picked up this book for a bargain price, as I still support around 60 Solaris boxen at my workplace. I enjoyed it very much, as it gives a good philosophical overview of the "why" in Solaris rather than just the "how". It could do with updating - I would buy an Open Solaris edition.

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

I thought this book was a very useful snapshot of *mostly* network admin topics. Sure, it could have been bigger. But how many manuals are there now on Solaris? Way too many, with too much detail for the average Joe admin. I think it was very useful to see how Solaris can support server-side Java without the top-end J2EE products which are slow (entity bean passivation/activation cycles being one example of the craziness at play). A great read.

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

it sucked big time , and the print also was bad

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

I was disappointed with this book. First book from O'reilly that made me feel like I bought a lemon. The reason for this disappointment probably is the fact that it tries to cover so much and therefor the topics covered could never be covered in depth enough.

Strangely enough some chapters go pretty deep while others really stop after no more than what feels like an introduction. Good idea : first check how deep the topic is covered by going through it quickly before you in ernest sit down and start reading it. You may find if you start reading a chapter without having an idea what is in it that the chapters stops at the very moment you get thirsty for more ...

Could be good to people that have no idea what System Administration is all about but to System Administrators this book is only very partially useful and there more than likely are better books available.

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

Very useful!

I think, for a short overview of how to configure Solaris, this book is quite good. It is unfair for the other reviewers to expect the hundreds of pages of the bat book to be compressed into a 20 page chapter - of course, you should refer to the other excellent O'Reilly titles in this area for more information. I have find this book to be more of a roadmap - and there's some good detail in there too. I liked the scientific approach to capacity estimation very refreshing - I know we all have rules of thumb for doing this, but it's nice to see some formal models.

Unlike Milo, I found the four pages on SSH to be more than sufficient.

I just hope there is a Solaris 9 version to be released soon covering more advanced topics.

J.B.

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

This is the best contemporary book on UNIX that I've read in a good while. There are so many books out there that concentrate on filling up endless pages of fluff with strange reworkings of UUCP and other historical beasts. This book has a good focus on Sun's (not necessarily UNIX's) strategic direction in terms of ONE and e-business. I know a lot of people don't agree with this, but unless you're a Wall St. pension fund analyst with Scott's phone number, you're not going to change Sun's thinking. I enjoyed the material on data management and modeling (rare in an OS book). I like the step-by-step approach of starting with systems and building networks. This could be greatly expanded (I would like to see a longer book).

More detail is required on LDAP and NIS-LDAP migration IMHO. Oracle should be covered as most Sun systems run Oracle. Why not cover iPlanet products in more depth like the application server instead of Apache? Everyone has their likes and dislikes but these are my suggestions.

Lawrence Kershaw

Richmond VA

Comments about oreilly Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide:

This is the most disappointing book I have ever gotten from O'Reilly. Even though this book claims to be targeted at experienced administrators it contains page upon page of filler that are usually the resultant output of some command that any UNIX administrator should be familiar with. e.g. see pp 75-76 and the listing of DNS root servers. The book glosses over important details of Solaris installation and configuration. Many important configuration files and useful commands are only mentioned in passing and are not explained or omitted entirely.



Power management needs to be covered in more detail.

There is no mention of the file /etc/defaultrouter and /etc/notrouter is mentioned only in passing.

The Solaris package management tools are discussed but there is no mention of what is perhaps their most important use, installing recommended patches from SUN's website.

The section on printer administration is inadequate for dealing with today's network connected printers.

The description of the sendmail.cf file contains an error in the definition of the C command as being a "Complex macro" the author should be directed to read the bat book chapter 32 Class Macros. Additionally there is little discussion of the simple modifications that can be made to a stock sendmail.cf file to make it useful for production. These would include setting sendmail's idea of the hostname, masquerading, using a relay host, and enabling or disabling mail submission.

There is only a brief mention in passing of the automounter and no mention of how to configure map files for the automounter in the chapter on file serving.

Credit should be given for the mention of the need to use secure shell instead of telnet, but again it's a case of not enough information about the specifics of configuring ssh for Solaris. Again in the section on disabling IP ports, the examples given are for ports that any UNIX sysadmin who's been conscious for the last ten years should know about. But no mention is made of the ports that are unique to Solaris.

My recommendation to any UNIX sysadmin who is newly responsible for a Solaris8 system is to get several other O'Reilly books that cover the specific areas that they're interested in and to be patient with and learn to search the provided Answerbook for Solaris specific information. In particular sendmail by Bryan Costales, with Eric Allman, TCP/IP Network Administration by Craig Hunt, Essential System Administration by Æleen Frisch, DNS and BIND by Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu and the SANS document Solaris Security Step By Step