Open Source Network Administration

For a sysadmin, putting "MIT Network Operations" on a resume must feel pretty satisfying. James Kretchmar got the job, and now has written the book. ALecs writes with his review of Kretchmar'sOpen Source Network Administration, below. Open Source Network Administration author James M. Kretchmar pages 220 publisher Prentice Hall (PTR) rating 9 reviewer Joshua Malone ISBN 0130462101 summary A brief tutotrial on using several open source packages to monitor and administer system networks Open Source Network Administration covers a number of open source tools designed to aid in managing computers and TCP/IP networks. The tools discussed in this book are all free, and are all top-quality tools that have earned their place in any system administrator's arsenal of administration and debugging tools. Included in this book are:

• SNMP (a protocol for managing network devices and hosts)
• MRTG (the Multi Router Traffic Grapher - a bandwidth utilization meter)
• Neo (a network device administration tool that speaks SNMP)
• Oak (a syslog watcher and digester)
• Nagios (an active network/host monitoring tool)
• Flow Tools (tools for processing Cisco NetFlow data)

This book also discusses more basic debugging tools such as ping, traceroute, tcpdump and others. Finally, Kretchmar provides some pointers on building your own tools using bash, perl, sed and awk.

Kretchmar is a network engineer for MIT and has gotten a lot of practical experience in managing large networks and unruly hosts. In this book, he imparts a large amount of that experience in over 200 quick-reading, no-nonsense pages. He tells you what a tool can do, how to get it and build it and provides examples of some typical uses. While beginning network administrators will feel comforted that he takes enough time to explain the tools he talks about, experienced ones can safely jump right to his equally well-explained configuration examples without missing anything crucial.

This book read so quickly and was so straightforward that it really inspired me to fix up some areas of my network monitoring that I knew were lacking, but hadn't bothered to fix. In particular, his chapter on Oak motivated me to implement an instant messaging infrastructure (like one he mentions using at MIT) to receive event notices quickly and without dependence on e-mail. While it's no bible (my staple, the Unix System Administration Handbook, is over 800 pages), this book provides a great start on quite a few great tools - many of which I plan to investigate soon.

I was a bit puzzled at his inclusion of instructions for building each tool when most of them are simply ./configure; make; make install. Only one of the tools seemed to actually merit building instructions. At least you can't say he isn't thorough.

I give this book nine stars (out of ten) simply because it really made me realize how easy it is to configure a lot of automation that Ive been wanting. The cover price of U.S. $44.99 strikes me as a bit high in the market, but it is significantly discounted at most online book stores. I still have to recommend The Unix System Administration Handbook first, however. It is more expensive, but contains much more scope and detail than this book. Those who have digested USAH, though, should consider picking this book up from your favorite e-tailer.

You can purchase Open Source Network Administration from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Reviewer, Virginia Tech alum and CHUUG member Josh Malone has been a Unix Systems and Network Administrator in Charlottesville, VA for three years.

Comments

Re:$4.50 more at Amazon

[Lxy]

Interesting.....

The above post is off topic and should be moderated as such. However, in the past "cheaper at Amazon" posts have been modded as trolls and flamebait. Now a post that it's cheaper at bn.com gets modded UP. Either way, it's an offtopic post.

Can we say "biased moderators" anybody?