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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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Euh... how can 2 people share one nick?
Please explain
This is a security issue
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Look again at the post you've linked to:
This user's id is actually "CmdrTaco on". (spaces are legal in usernames).
Coffee ketchup gives 'em flavour
Coffee pickles 'way outsell the dill...
They've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.
Have you heard Soul Coughing's cover of this? Quite amazing.
Carousel is a lie!
"Most programmers have oversized egos as it is, and going on about how 'code is art' doesn't help the matter."
This makes programming even sound more like art.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Why yes, that's the very version I'm referencing. Soul Coughing rocks my world. After hearing 'Circles' I went out and downloaded everything I could find by them, and after wearing a hole in those MP3s, I went out and bought all the albums. TAKE THAT RIAA!
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
I'm usually never bothered by using the feminine pronouns for the general gender. I can certainly see that some people (especially women) care enough to make pronoun choice an issue. For example, 30 years ago, nobody used "Ms." as a title, now if I see a "Mrs." or a "Miss" on a letter it's usually a sign that somebody's grandmother is mailing letters.
Using 'their' for a the general singular pronoun is apparently much more common and accepted in England. However, that seems more awkward (to me) than using 'her'.
Michael Spivak, famed mathematician and TeXpert, created an option called Spivak Pronouns which address the issue too:
The spivak pronouns are
E - subjective
Em - objective
Eir - possessive (adjective)
Eirs - possessive (noun)
Emself - reflexive
These seem very awkward to me, but who knows what will be in common use in 30 years...
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My father is a blogger.
As a first note, the race issue was brought in as a comparison. The parent poster didn't say or imply that you were a racist. Also, that poster's comment was to the effect that saying "his" and saying "her" are interchangeable in this day and age, and your finding it hard to read is your problem, not the author's.
Now, you should not necessarily take my comment to indicate that I agree, because while I see the parent poster's point, I don't think you're coming from nowhere, since there's a great deal of precedent for using the male pronoun in non-gender specific conversation. Still, the view that "his" is more appropriate than "her" in this case is merely precedent, so you may want to give some thought to why you find it harder to read.
Virg
rancid mystery loaves
steady micron slavery
comedy striven salary
trendy mosaic slavery
convert already missy
scary devil monastery
misty adversary clone
mail covers dysentary
discover anal mystery
(alt.sysadmin.recovery)
Official acronym list from the ASR FAQ