Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

I agree with the first commenter. When I saw the assertion that sendmail 'by default allows open relaying', I turned to the front of the book to see when this book had been published. As a long term user/administrator of sendmail I knew that, even in March 2007, this 'default' action had been changed to prevent open relaying - at least in RedHat Enterprise Linux.

As a user of both RedHat and Fedora Linux I found the examples for other distros arcane and confusing. I rather wish that I'd saved my money and bought some other title or a later version of one of the 1eds that I have.

Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

I agree with Mathew, the chroot environment the book leads the reader to create effectively broke my DNS server. I am stuck on chapter 2 trying to sort out how and if I can get around it. I think it has something to do with the permissions settings...

Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

This book is good for references (beginners,advanced users).

I have a doubt, in the page number 13, there is a ip address 70.153.258.42, in the third byte, it can not be 258 the high value allow is 255.

But there is no problem the book is great !!! you wont waste your money!!!

Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

I found this book to be quite good for a Windows system admin for their first few servers, and it also seems to be a good reference for those of us who have built a few already. The chapter and examples of writing scripts are quite good as well.

Each chapter has detailed examples of how to setup server programs such as postfix, although I found the section on setting up a FTP server to be severely lacking. The book also does not include setting up SpamAssassin or Amavisd for the postfix server it shows how to set up.

Overall I think that a new system admin should use this book, along with system admins who need a simple reference for the basics.

Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

'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 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...

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.

Comments about oreilly Linux System Administration:

4 out of 5 stars

Let me start off by saying this book is easy to read and understand. I really found each chapter to be modular and this enhanced the readability of the book. I think that even a novice could get a multifunctional server up and running. The step by step instructions that follow a brief overview is a basic but genius way of transitioning from each part of the initial to the final stages of the set up and configuration process. I am only half way through the project but I am eager to finish the book as I set up a fedora core 6 server for my network administration class.

The only negative thing that I can say about the manual is: I wish this book dealt with Redhat fedora instead of Debian as the operating system but that is just a minor detail.

Mark