Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration In 24 Hours

Spencerian writes "UNIX guru and writer Dave Taylor's Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours is a strong "rosetta stone" reference and tutorial for beginning and intermediate Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX system administrators. The book covers fundamental and specialized UNIX sysadmin tasks for three UNIX flavors: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Solaris 8, and Mac OS X, version 10.1.2. Although Mac OS X and Red Hat have advanced in versions since this book was published, it doesn't appear to affect the book's usefulness since many of the tasks involve the venerable UNIX command line." The rest of Kevin's review is below -- read on to see if this book might help you. Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours author Dave Taylor pages 508 publisher Sams Publishing rating 8 reviewer Kevin Spencer ISBN 0672323982 summary Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours makes an excellent rosetta stone for beginning or intermediate UNIX sysadmins.

The Big Picture As you might get from the title, Sams Publishing's "24 Hours" book series attempts to teach specific tasks or steps within 1 chapter per hour. UNIX can get pretty complex, so it would seem that this format would limit the effectiveness of this book. Not so.

Topics from the book include:

• Unix Installation
• Documentation
• File Ownership
• Disk Usage
• Account Management
• Package Management (including the Fink system for Darwin)
• Process and System Controls
• Network configuration
• Web Server Management and shell scripting

Almost every chapter views how a particular task is handled with Linux as its normal focus, where many commands are shared between Solaris and Mac OS X. When functionality differs, Taylor downshifts to show how matters are handled in each respective operating system. As someone very experienced with Mac OS X, I found Dave Taylor's discussions on Mac OS X idiosyncrasies in contrast to Red Hat and Solaris very useful, particularly where Darwin overrides the traditional dotfile preference configuration, substituting the convoluted NetInfo services.

What to Expect Dave provides a Q & A section after each chapter. In an early chapter, Dave answers a typical geek question, "What Unix distributions do you run on your own systems?" Dave provides a very geeky answer--his Apple PowerBook G4 is running Mac OS X (with Darwin as its core, of course), along with a PC running Windows 2000, Linux Mandrake 8.1, and a web server running Red Hat Linux 7.2--a varied assortment that shows Dave puts the author in authority. In a later chapter, Dave touches on emulators such as WINE and Virtual PC as options for additional operating system support.

What makes the book work is that Dave provides a very conversational tone throughout the book, almost as if you're sitting with him in front of a system, talking while you do your thing. Humorous moments are scattered in appropriate moments to make things less dry (this is UNIX, after all).

Questions that weren't answered for me as a beginning UNIX sysadmin in another book by Dave Taylor, Learning UNIX for Mac OS X , were available in droves in this book. Topics such as scripting with perl or from the shell, disk quotas, crontabs, rlogin, managing system logs, and the like--all answered. Ever wondered how Mac OS X handles system init states? You'll discover that its a tad different from other UNIX systems, but not too much.

The Bad and the Upshot I ran into several layout problems in the book that were somewhat annoying, such as where tables or notes were sliced between pages, making them difficult to read. It wasn't a showstopper at all, but I hope that a later reprint will pass muster.

If you're still getting your feet wet with a few basics, or have a really mixed environment of UNIX flavors, this book may be very useful to you. I'd recommend this book to any Mac OS X technician who wants to take advantage of its UNIX underpinnings. Beginning Linux users should also find this a strong general reference. The book's cost ($25) is very reasonable, even a bargain for a book of this depth. Overall, Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours makes for a very well rounded reference, as well as a tutorial book. Perhaps the title should be shorter--it's quite a tongue twister.

You can purchase Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration in 24 Hours from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

The only thing a newbie needs to know:

[Pig Hogger]

sudo rm / -r

Re:The only thing a newbie needs to know:

[segfaultcoredump]

# rm / -r
rm: / is a directory
-r: No such file or directory

Hmmmm, dont you mean 'rm -r /' ? (i know, the '/ -r' syntax workes on linux, but not some of the other unixes out there, like solaris)

Re:thanks for the tip!

[odaiwai]

Yes, it's very simple

>$ su -
password:
[ enter password]
># passwd
Enter new passwd: [enter]
again: [enter]

Now, you never need to enter your password again!

Oh, and the disk compression utility is `rm -r -f /` (-rf works on some). The -f is very important, or you'll have to say 'y' to every filename.

for the more sophisticated user:

for FILE in `tree -if`; do mv $FILE /dev/null; done

dave

No, please, stop, your killing me!

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

Hee hee ... ho hoo .. you're killing me. Oh ... mercy ... let me wipe the tear of laughter from my eye.

Oh my .. that was a good laugh. UNIX System Administration in 24 hours ... yeah, I want one of those near my mission critical Solaris servers. I'm sure I can sleep entirely confident that the big iron in my data center will be entirely and completely secure ... ho, ho ... heee .. I can't stop laughing ... oh please stop ... no, don't mention backups and restoratin contingencies ... hhhooooeeeee

I mean 24 hours isn't a whole lot of time to give someone the experience they need to catch things before they happen .. I mean, I realize *NIX isn't as geeky as it used to be ... but c'mon kids ... what happens when you need someone to administer something 'for real' like an Apache server?

Re:Unix Hater's Handbook

[__past__]

Preface
The X-Windows Disaster
Some quotes
The Unix Hater's Mailinglist archive
Additional Unix-Hater's information