Slashdot Mirror

raggy wrote in to say that Cyclic is discontinuing its' support for the CVS system. Existing contracts will, of course, be honored - however, with Jim Kingdon taking a job at Red Hat, CVS support is being passed to the community.

Note: This is a repost of Linux Companion for System Administrators Linux Companion for System Administrators author Jochen Hein pages publisher Addison Wesley rating 9 reviewer Jabbo ISBN summary If you plan to deploy a Linux box in a commercial environment, and aren't a veteran Unix administrator, buy this book. It will save you vast amounts of time, and is admirably concise. The ScenarioLet's suppose you're an administrator. And let's suppose you run Linux. Unless you're either a grizzled Unix admin or an absolute wizard, you will eventually run into problems that seem too complex to take care of, or you might throw up your hands when there is already a perfectly good tool to handle your problem. This book will help you through such problems, and is the only decent Linux-specific administration guide I have seen. I only wish it had been available when I first started running Linux.

What's Bad?There is minimal coverage of Perl, fvwm is the sole windowmanager covered, awk is the example scripting language, and in the CVS section there is no URL given for the reader to find more information (how about www.cyclic.com for starters?). Coverage of printing is not as thorough as one might like. There is no mention made of RPM, YAST, or other package management tools, nor is there much attention to setting up Apache properly as a web server. It was written in German about a year ago, and has only now been translated, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the 1999 publication date would suggest.

What's Good?At this point it would be fair to ask why the book rates as a 9/10. The reason I feel so positively towards this book is that its coverage of DNS, NFS, RCS, groups, and kernel reconfiguration is far and away the best I've ever seen in a book with LCfSA's relatively small size and broad scope. The ideal place for this book is on a sysadmin's desk, nestled between copies of "Essential System Administration" and the K&R book, which are probably the mightiest tools an admin can wield. This slim, relatively cheap volume is enormously helpful because, unlike the O'Reilly book, it is Linux-specific -- warts and all. It is hardbound, which is nice for a book that you may end up using for years. There are excellent introductions to "why-not-a-microkernel" and other topics which have shaped the current version of Linux. XEmacs, ssh, and various emulation packages (ibcs, wine, dosemu) are all introduced. The emphasis of this book is heavily on integrating Linux into a heterogenous network, which in my experience is a minimally-documented aspect of Linux. Samba and ncpfs (serving Windows and Netware, respectively) are covered, as are the dangers of the Nightmare File System at large installations. The reader is instructed to consult the various RFCs for networking standards, which is a fine habit to acquire, as is Hein's emphasis on Linux security. Last but not least, Hein mentions slashdot.org right in the preface.

So What's In It For Me?A relatively green administrator stands to gain the most from this book; if you can set up a DNS server on your lunch break and do a hot backup of Oracle while merging a bunch of RCS branches from inside Emacs, you won't learn much from Hein's book that you don't already know. For newer admins or people who would like to use Linux's stability and modest hardware requirements to augment an existing NT or Netware installation, however, this book is packed full of handy information which is useful in a pinch. Ideally, one should also have a copy of the O'Reilly armadillo book, as this volume is in many respects complementary to that book. However, the more technically inclined could probably get by with just this volume.

To Purchase this book from Amazon, click here.

Table of Contents-- Preface

Linux -- Operating System of the Future?
The File System Hierarchy Standard
System Start-up
Configuration and Administration
The Emacs Editor
The X Window System
Backup
National Language Support
Localization
UNIX Tools
Tools (not only) For Programmers
TeX and LaTeX Under Linux
Emulators Under Linux
Linux in a Networked Environment
TCP/IP Basics
IP Addresses and Computer Names
Network Applications
Network File System (NFS)
Anonymous FTP Servers
Linux in a Heterogenous Network
Configuration and Operation of a Name Server
Network Information Service
The bootp Protocol
Connection via SLIP and PPP
Linux and the World Wide Web
Network Administration
-- Appendices
The Standard Editor vi
Generating Passwords
References
List of Important RFCs
-- Index

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious. It was a lot of fun. People everywhere, tons of booths, and penguin merchandise as far as the eye could see. One of my profs (Dr. Jipping: Hello! Don't fail me in small machines!) has a simple measure for any conference- the number of t-shirts you acquire. For me, this was a 7 shirt conference. This means I can eradicate all those nasty shirts with holes in them and frayed edges. I'm afriad I was embarassing most of the city with my warddrobe, so I'm sure they thank all the exhibitors more than I do.

Highlights for me? Well my laptop suffered amazing abuse- From the coke spilled all over the screen and keyboard, to the mystic CD-ROM drive that suddenly stops closing, I knew I was in for a fun weekend. Especially when my D key joined my X key in a unified strike against touch typing- but never fear! Donald Becker came to my rescue. So not only can he write mean ethernet code, but he can fix keyboards too. Thanks a million man! it's great being able to delete charachters in vi again.

ESR has some stories to tell about his Geeks with Guns adventure. He said he'll have some details for us later, but the funniest thing that I heard him say is that RMS is actually an excellent shot. He probably has amazingly powerful fingers from all those crazy emacs key bindings *grin*. They're gonna supposedly do it again at the next show and he's threatening to make me come- hope they have extra large targets for me.

VA Research donated about 6 million t-shirts to Slashdot/Themes.org/Freshmeat which were quite popular. By the end of the show, Scoop and I went on a mad dash throughout the building throwing the remainder of the supply at anyone who would sit still, and tried swapping them for anything we could get (UltraSparcs, 21" Monitors, Switched Hubs- oh wait, no never mind, t-shirts and stickers :)

A few people wrote in to remind me about a bunch of Corel's announcements that apparently aren't getting any major publicity else where. Not only has Corel now joined Linux Interntional, but they are donating a part of the profits from WP8/Linux to LI. They also said that binaries would be available for platforms that had demand (Alpha and PPC were both whispered and shouted, and presumably x86 and Strongarm is planned already). The keynote speech from Dr. Cowpland also mentioned that Corel was going to help with Wine development, and that they would shift to KDE or Gnome when the market was ready. San Mehat also promised to send me a NetWinder after showing off his Netwinder. Mind you his netwinder was a 10 chip beowulf cluster communicating over SCSI. Hot swappable CPUs. Wow. They said they can do 40 of those things, and it still runs cool. Super cool.

There are like 30 sites that people submitted loaded with pictures. Kestrel sent me good one that even features a picture of Hemos & I showing some skin. Gasp.

No Slashdot wasn't tampered with- I obvioisly faked the poll this weekend. I don't really think there are a hundred thousand people who wanted to see OctobrX naked at ALS.

I've got a copy of Oracle sitting on my desk at home to play with, as well as a copy of Applix from Linux Central. I'm looking forward to a free afternoon to play with them. Spare time is mythical for me right now though.

Those caffeinated penguin mints are crazy. Do not take more than 6. After 7 on thursday I crashed hard. Not as hard as Mandrake though. He was hiding out at the Slashdot/Themes/Meat booth for much of saturday shaking off the fun and games from the night before. He also gave me permission to fake his death if I ever decide I'm not getting enough flame mail.

Shook hundreds of hands. Met tons of readers. Had a really great time. I want to again thank Cyclic and VA for getting us all down there, giving us shirts and machines to demo with, and just generally being cool guys to talk to. Lots of people had good suggestions for Slashdot, and many of them will probably be incorporated as soon as I get the machine stable again. Many other people had suggestions for that too, and I'll keep trying. Its definately mysql right now, and I'm working on it as fast as I can. I'm sure once I fix it I'll break something else. I think its time to hire a competant sysadmin, cuz I sure ain't that.

It was especially cool meeting up with OctobrX and Scoop and hanging out with them. Hemos and I both had a great time hanging out with them. Now, back to class. The downside to conferences is that ya gotta go back to real life afterwards to live. At least until LinuxWorld and The Bazaar. Looking forward to seeing everyone there too...

(I probably forgot a ton of things to mention in this article- so much happened so fast, but now I need to go to class. If I forgot something super cool, let me know and I'll make sure to get it in here when I get back in front of a net connected box.)

It's all fun and games out here at ALS, hopefully I can sit down now and actually get the summary out before either netscape crashes again, or something else occurs that forces me to leave the safe haven that is the Slash/Themes/Meat booth. Hit the link and read the deal... I haven't had much time to hit the speakers- running a booth sorta requires that you're actually there sometimes. But I did manage to catch the Raster & Mandrake show. They ran down the status of Enlightenment's development and basically wowed the whole room with all the uber cool features that will be available when DR15 hits the wire. No they didn't announce a release date.

Dr. Michael Cowpland of Corel had a whole host of cool things to say, including the announcement of Word Perfect 8, free for personal use. He talked about the NetWinders (the corel booth actually has a 10 netwinder beowulf cluster running... how many ways can you spell drool?).

So a quick rundown of some of the highlights of the exhibits- yeah Corel has a 10 machine Netwinder beowulf cluster. Christmas is coming... mommy?

All the distributions major distributions are here: Red Hat (of course) is here in full force. The RHAD booth and the Red Hat booth are pretty popular. Debian is here (hey Debian! The Themes/Meat/Slash booth challanges you to quake! Be gentle). Caldera and SuSE are here too. Got a big stack of SuSE CDs to bring back home to the SuSE addicts.

As for hardware, Alta Technology is showing off Alpha boxes that are alltogether far to fast for me to tolerate. VA is here (side note:my presense here, as well as that of Trae & Scoop & Hemos is sponsored by VA Research and Cyclic Software so go buy their stuff) with some quite impressive machines. In fact, I think that most of the machines that I've seen scattered around are VA boxes. Penguin Computing has a fairly scary machine that features 12 fans. Redundancy is always nice *grin*.

It's pretty crazy seeing Oracle, Informix, Sun etc etc here. No doubt that we're definately mainstream now. Very cool.

What else? There's enough Linux and Penguin merchandise to last well after the apocalypse. Stuffed penguins, t-shirts, CDs, fuzzy little penguins, stickers, hats. Jeff and I came here with no spare shirts, and we're still not naked so I guess we're doing all right :)

Crowds are gathering, so I'll wrap this up for now. I'll post more yet before the sun sets.

Hemos and I are seconds away from leaving for ALS. Everyone be good while we're gone! We'll hopefully be back online yet tonight and be able to post live reports from the show. Looking forward to seeing a lot of you at the t.o/fm//. booth. (Thanks again to Cyclic Software and VA Research for getting all of us down there and setting us up)

boinger wrote in to send us a link to a yahoo bit saying that ALS has broken the record for the largest number of exhibitors at a Linux conference. I bet this trend continues for every con for that comes along for awhile. I'll be there. I guess I'm one of the exhibitors (VA Research and Cyclic are our official sponsors, so go buy their stuff :) in a booth with t.o and freshmeat so see ya there. No, I won't be naked, but I might go topless for a bit if anyone wants to give me a laptop with a fully functional x key *grin*

OctobrX hinted at it, but here's the deal. Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Themes.org are going to be going to the Atlanta Linux Showcase at the end of October. Hemos and Myself will be representing Slashdot, along with OctobrX and Scoop from Themes & FM respectively. We'll have a booth and some VA Research machines to run web sites on. The whole adventure is being sponsored by VA and Cyclic Software. If there is demand I can bring shirts for folks. We're still working out what we're going to do with the booth- the nude interpretive dance idea seems to be a popular choice though.

Jim Kingdon writes "In our never-ending quest to write free software and make a living at it, Cyclic has started shipping our CVS CD-ROM. It includes the CVS, Aegis, and PRCS version control systems. Officially supported operating systems are Linux and a less-known OS out of Redmond, Washington. "

Jim Kingdon writes "In our never-ending quest to write free software and make a living at it, Cyclic has started shipping our CVS CD-ROM. It includes the CVS, Aegis, and PRCS version control systems. Officially supported operating systems are Linux and a less-known OS out of Redmond, Washington. "