Slashdot Mirror
The Practice of System and Network Administration
Though not a nitty gritty technical book, this volume is a must have for every professional sysadmin, regardless of skill level or the technology she uses. The book focuses on the methods used by successful system administrators to build, support, and grow their networks. For the novice admin, it offers a good big-picture look at the most important "whys" of system administration. For the intermediate admin, it has great advice on how to balance fire fighting with project work that will help strengthen the infrastructure and lead to less emergency handling. For the senior admin, there are gems of design wisdom and sections on how to deal with being in a managerial or team leader role. Because it's more high level, this book is even a good buy for people who manage sysadmins but are not themselves technical.
What's Covered
The book is broken down into four major parts, The Principles, The Processes, The Practices, and Management. The chapters in each section are conveniently split into the "basics," the "icing" (things to concentrate on after all of the basics have been accomplished), and some exercises at the end to help the reader apply the covered information to her own situation. The authors back up their sound advice with many case studies and, often tragically humorous, war stories that really drive home the salient points. The BOFHs among us will certainly love some of the follies that the book recounts.
The Principles
This chapter deals with fundamental issues sysadmins encounter and how to define a site-wide infrastructure. The topics range from desktop and server setup, to security, debugging, and ethics. Of particular interest to me were the latter three. I was hoping that the security section would give a bit more detail about a layered security approach as part of the policy. The authors offered good pointers on developing a site security policy without going into specifics, though. The debugging section was spot on, and something that even your help desk people should read. Instead of the hit-or-miss technique that so many inexperienced people use to diagnose problems, this gave a thorough outline of how to methodically determine and fix a problem. In light of the current Enron fiasco, the ethics section was quite timely. How do you do the right thing (or even determine what that is) and then not get stuck as the scapegoat? Though they're not lawyers, Limoncelli and Hogan offer some sound advice and quote from the SAGE Code of Ethics.
The Processes
This section entails how to create the framework for making successful changes to your infrastructure. Topic highlights include change management and revision control, server upgrades, maintenance windows, and service conversions. Change management is one of the most perilously neglected portions of the system administration field today. How should changes be made to the systems so that they are as seamless as possible? Who changed what, when? How do you get back to a known state? My one nit is that I would have liked to see a bit more about automation (rsync, cfengine, et al) discussed in this chapter, especially in dealing with upgrades and service conversions.
The Practices
The authors choose a few important services to discuss in detail here:
- The helpdesk
- Customer care
- Data centers
- Networks
- Email service
- Print service
- Data recovery
- Remote access
- Software depots
- Service monitoring
These topics were well covered, but the one omission from this section was web service (and possibly a section on Usenet, though that's waning in popularity these days). The namesapces chapter from the Principles section would have also flowed better as part of a DNS chapter in this section. One especially amusing story in the monitoring chapter describes an alarm system in a machine room calling the on-duty sysadmin in the wee hours of the morning to tell him, in a sultry female voice, I'm hot. I'm wet. Too bad his wife answers and thinks it's a prank call when it's really a broken HVAC system!
Management
This section covers how to best deal with the human side of system administration and really explores how people can actually like their jobs instead of just slogging through them every day. There's some outstanding advice on how to deal with difficult situations (time management, difficult people, professional development, keeping people motivated and managing them well, etc). This is also the first book that I know of that includes salary negotiating tips for sysadmins. The management section could almost stand alone as a book geared towards the particular problems that many sysadmins experience.
Other bits
Unlike most other books, the introduction and the appendices are also very worthwhile reads. The introduction covers the three fundamental things that ever site should already be doing: using a ticketing system, handling quick requests right, and starting every host in a known state. The first two appendices cover the various hats that sysadmins wear and "what to do when..." situations. The latter is extremely valuable, and is also available from the book's web site.
In all, this book receives an enthusiastic thumbs up!"
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Books like this need to be written, disseminated, and then force-fed to anyone who wants to touch Systems Administration for a profession - or even work with sysadmins tangentally. I've spent too much time justifying my practices and beliefs about administration to people who had precisely zero working knowledge of the art; would that we lived in a world where this was no longer necessary!
:)
*sighs*. I can keep dreaming.
... Books about general topics/practices. If you focused an admin book towards a specific OS (ie NT, Unix, whatever), you could easily wind up with a admin who freaks out when dealing with a different OS on the network. I prefer to see books deal with the overall scope of a topic , rather than focusing down on a specific product. ( ie. You buy a book on XML and get to learn everything you ever wanted to know about MSXML... um...ok...but what if you're a unix geek )..
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Personally I'd reccommend this for novice to average people who's role is changing or who are changing job to sysadmin in a different company or environment.
A lot of the skills and behaviours people pick up will be heavily flavoured by the environment in which they picked them up; this book will help people to understand the common practices in sysadmining - what changes and what stays the same in different environments. Sysadmining in a university is very different to in an ISP or in a tech-corporation or in a non-tech-corporation.
In fact, probably _especially_ for NT admins. NT admins often seem to lack the exact background, sensitivity, and discipline that this book is talking about. Even though some of things are hard to implment (revision control for configurations, etc), the principles apply to _all_ production systems.
This is the best sysadmin book I've ever read. This plus a practical how-to book like USAH and O'Reilly's Unix Backup and Recovery are the three cornerstones that everyone should start with as a starting sysadmin. This book in particular will save you 2-3 years of frustration unless you work in a very disciplined shop.
It don't think it has to be that big, if it provides a good outline of the topics covered plus pointers where you can find more information about the topic.
I would rather buy a book that gives me good hints to find the answers by myself, than a book that tells me it knows it all, but only provides surface answers...
Oliver.
I got started by being dropped into the middle of the mix, myself. I was doing web coding for the University of Florida's Office of the University Registrar, when, in short order, two previous admins bailed out (after being passed up for promotions and raises - ah, politics). As the only guy left who knew the systems, I had to take up the banner and carry us forth as best I could.
:)
I just really took to systems administration. Few things please me more than to see my machines running quietly, humming along and making other people productive. I approach it like an art, treat it like an art, a chance for me to develop skills and express them while doing some good for the community I'm serving at any given time.
I guess it's really a matter of one's perception. At least my job satisfaction is usually pretty high.
I agree that this is also a great book to pick up. This is, in fact, the book that I did cut my teeth on as a novice sysadmin (back when it was Ed 1, the yellow book). the UNIX System Administration Handbook is my favorite book for learning about specific tools for UNIX, but Limoncelli and Hogan's book cover high level design ideas which the UNIX System Administration Handbook doesn't really get into.
I'm female, and I'd rather just read "his" in place of all this P.C. crap.
Christina! Bring me an axe!
By your definition, the kid working at Baskin Robbins making your sundae is an artist. Kind of trivializes musicians and painters, doesn't it?
You seem to claim that if there are many ways of fulfilling a technical requirement, the act of choosing one way and implementing it makes one an artist.
Complexity does not equal art. Never has, never will.
Dilbert: "What color database do you want?"
PHB: "I think the mauve ones have the most RAM."
I remember carefully talking my boss out of buying a million dollar performance management package that *only* worked on Solaris, would require another quarter million in hardware, and only served to make pretty pictures from sar output. They ran a free audit on a bunch of our heavily used servers and confirmed what we already suspected-- we were fine, we didn't need their stuff. My boss finally agreed not to buy the software, but I think he was really heartbroken over it. He loved the graphics.
"But look! You can drill down!"
Really, the answer to this problem is finesse. Most PHBs are fundamentally well-intentioned, they just don't understand all the issues. They aren't supposed to, that's your job. So when they show up at work excited about the all-in-one doodad they heard about on the radio on the way to work, you just have to be a little patient. Do a little research. Be tactful. Say, "Wow, that Doodad seems to be a really interesting product, unfortunately they only recommend it for use up to 50 users and we have 10,000."
Treat the PHB like an idiot (even if he's acting like one) and he'll get defensive and insist on throwing his weight around. Be respectful and maybe even a little submissive and you'll earn his trust. Then life gets a lot simpler.
Sarah
The review on amazon and bookpool are the same, yes (why write the same short review more than once)? I don't recall writing one for B&N (I don't buy books there), and I don't see one there claiming to be from me..? As a matter of fact, B&N claims that there are no customer reviews so far.
I wrote the amazon book review first and decided that I felt strongly enough about the book to post a review here too. slashdot reviews are more fleshed out than storefront reviews, so this one is expanded. I mostly buy technical books via bookpool, so that also seemed like a good place to put the shorter review.
I hardly consider it spam to review a book in three places! Do you only tell three friends about this cool book you just read..? No.