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

MIT so great why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it so great to put MIT on your resume? I can think of a 100 different place I would rather at before the MIT NOC. Seriously what does MIT do at their NOC that makes it so special. Hell I could use those tools at home on my linksys router, save the Cisco Netflow stuff.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[Chris_Stankowitz]

Why is it so great to put MIT on your resume? I can think of a 100 different place I would rather at before the MIT NOC. Seriously what does MIT do at their NOC that makes it so special. Hell I could use those tools at home on my linksys router, save the Cisco Netflow stuff.

Thousands of geeks *already* inside your network

Re:MIT so great why ?

[AKAImBatman]

Unfortunately, that's the exact attitude that many employers take. Apparently nothing impresses them about a candidate except:

1. An ability to kiss ass.
2. Knowing less than the employer.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't the point to hire people smarter/more knowledgeable than yourself? Otherwise, you should be able to do the job yourself!

Re:MIT so great why ?

[mikeee]

First-rate people hire first-rate people.

Second-rate people hire third-rate people.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[shaneb11716]

Still haven't gotten over that rejection letter from the MIT Undergrad Admissions Office, eh?

-Shane

Re:MIT so great why ?

[YanceyAI]

Unless, of course, you are too busy managing other things and need someone to help you. I can edit, but I don't have time. I need to know how to edit in order to know the person I hired is competent and pays attention to detail.

I would say the same holds true for IT managers. They could findout out why the connection is down, but if they are doing their jobs, they don't have time to and rely on their employees.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[zin]

Never applied, I went to RIT (www.rit.edu.) Great school, great fellow geek population and great professors and classes. I don't need to have a school name behind me cause I put my reputation there.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[adam872]

I guess it has something to do with the fact that MIT is considered one of the U.S.'s best engineering schools and by implication is attended and staffed by some of the best technical minds in the country.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[kfg]

Charlie Daniels was accused, during an interview, of not being that great a musician and simply hiring people better than himself to back him, making him just look good.

To which Charlie replied, roughly," I'm just a front man. Of course they're better than me. If they weren't I wouldn't have hired them.

Charlie knows something.

You'll never see a job ad that says "Wanted: Really Smart Guy."

No boss really wants that guy around the place. Despite some of your other respondents this fairly common knowledge with lots of anecdotal evidence.

Robert Townsend, author of "Up the Orininization" and former President of both Avis and American Express wrote that every company should have a Bullshit guy. This is a guy whose only job is to wander around and yell "Bullshit!" any time he sees any in a company practice. It' would take a reasonably smart guy to fill this position.

And what boss would have him, wandering around yelling "Bullshit!" at all the policies he implemented?

I take the idea a bit further though. Every company of any size should have a position that's called "The Smart Guy." Officially. That's what it would say on his cards and everything.

No official duties other than being smart, curious, informed and the interest to keep himself informed, on nearly anything.

Anybody in the company could talk to "The Smart Guy." Network's down and you can't figure it out? Go talk to The Smart Guy. Maybe he doesn't know the answer, in fact he probably doesn't, but talking to someone smart might helf you think about the problem in a way that allows its solution.

Extrapolate.

You'll never, ever see this position advertised. Not because it's not a good idea, but because every boss thinks that he's The Smart Guy. He wouldn't be "boss" otherwise. Right?

KFG

Re:MIT so great why ?

[AKAImBatman]

> That would be hiring someone overqualifed to do the job.

You're trying to tell me that my IT manager should always be better at programming or adminning than I am? It's his job to *manage*, not do the grunt work. He may know how, but his job is quite a bit different and involves at lot of communication, specing, translating, etc. that have nothing to do with the grunt work itself. The grunt work is my job and I do it well.

Oh, and experience really counts for diddly-squat to these managers. They hire juniors only, or "experienced" individuals who really aren't all that experienced.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[AKAImBatman]

> Unless, of course, you are too busy managing other things and need someone to help you.

That is a secretarial or junior level position. And in that case, the IT manager himself probably wouldn't be the final say. When a employer doesn't want to hire anyone too smart, you'll note that the IT manager (or perhaps HR rep) is the only person you talk to.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[AKAImBatman]

Will someone please mod parent up? Geez, the mods seem to be slacking these days.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[illumina us]

100? there are only so many /8 networks, few of which are committed to using open-source tools, and i highly doubt MIT's is at the bottom of that list. I can make another one in my house right now if I wanted to and assign a whopping 6 IPs, just in my room alone! There are only so many /8 networks that are routable. Anyone can setup a Class A-F network if they wanted to, whether or not the rest of the world sees it as that on the other hand is another question.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[illumina us]

I guess it has something to do with the fact that MIT is considered one of the U.S.'s best engineering schools and by implication is attended and staffed by some of the best technical minds in the country. actually MIT is considered the best U.S. engineering school and quite possibly the best world wide. Which is precisely why I will not get in with a 3.4 GPA, 26 ACT, and 1180 SAT scores :(

Re:MIT so great why ?

[cduffy]

First-rate people hire first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people.

Ahh, but it's *sooo* true.

My workplace recently needed a new lead sysadmin. I reccomended one of the best sysadmin/system-level-programmer types I knew. Everyone who interviewed him agreed he was the best person we'd talked to -- except the VP of Engineering, who refused to hire him (but wouldn't say why).

Well, a few weeks go by, we haven't found anyone else who's up to snuff, so the VP gives in and hires this guy. Then the VP finds out that when he tries to micromanage system administration (and do things in order of visibility rather than dependency order) that the IT team actually starts *pushing back*, telling him exactly why his plans will take more time in the long run, require extra work, result in poorer service overall, etc etc.

The VP of Engineering no longer talks to the IT lead, or anyone else on IT if he can avoid it -- yet IT is dramatically more productive and provides better service to the engineering staff than was previously the case. Funny how that works, eh?

(And the other funny thing is that I don't really have a problem posting this here -- even if our dear VP of Engineering *does* find it. Frankly, I think I'd rather enjoy the outcome if he tried to fire me over this).

Re:MIT so great why ?

[hazem]

That reminds me of something...

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."

Ahh, life is good as a Beta!

Re:MIT so great why ?

[niom]

You'll never, ever see this position advertised. Not because it's not a good idea, but because every boss thinks that he's The Smart Guy. He wouldn't be "boss" otherwise. Right?

Of course that position won't ever be implemented in any company, but I disagree about the reason.

In my experience, people who've been at a company for a longish time (like most bosses) are mainly interested in keeping the power they have and grabbing a bit more when they see the chance. Doing a good work is just worthy of attention as another instrument to that goal.

A Smart Guy who invades every boss's area of decision is just going to mess too much with internal politics. Even if the bosses could agree with the reasoning behind hiring a Smart Guy, they aren't going to tolerate an uncontrollable influence like that in the decision space they've earned so hardly.

So even if someone in upper management with enough power went ahead and hired a Smart Guy, management unrest would shortly grow so high that the Smart Guy would be quickly disposed of.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[Wolfrider]

--Sometimes life is better as a Gamma; you get to turn green, bulk up and run around smashing things. ;)

Re:MIT so great why ?

[kfg]

Perhaps you misunderstand The Smart Guy concept. He would have absolutely no decision making power. He is not part of "managment" at all, except as managment sees fit to access his "smarts."

His thoughts may have influence, as do the thoughts of everyone in an organization, to one extent or another, but they do not decide, any more than an encyclopedia "decides."

But yes, he would be perceived as usurping power just by the virtue of the appearance of his being smarter than the "boss."

On the whole, one of the problems with management is that they aren't, typically, smart enough to understand what their job is, nor is the social structure built by such managers conducive to those that do actually understand the function of managment.

KFG

Re:MIT so great why ?

[AKAImBatman]

On the whole, one of the problems with management is that they aren't, typically, smart enough to understand what their job is, nor is the social structure built by such managers conducive to those that do actually understand the function of managment.


That rolls up pretty easily:

"Individuals get promoted to their level of incompetence."

Re:MIT so great why ?

[Symbiosis]

Scores schmores. I'm not at the top of the numbers game, and I'm here. Personality can go a long way if you can show it in your apps. ;-)

Re:MIT so great why ?

[smitty45]

show me something that is better than MRTG and rddtools and/or Cricket. anything.

Re:MIT so great why ?

[Avihson]

Routable: accessable from the internet. Private IP schemes on your linksys are not routable past the linksys.
Sure you could setup multiple soho routers and have a bunch of nested NATs, but that is not the same as having a whole class A subnet that is accessible from anywhere!

Do a scan on MITs net and see what all is there - just a few more that 3 machines!

More to the point, if you are good enough to work at the MIT NOC, you are truly a geek's geek.

Why use a class A subnet scheme at home? Is that a new status symbol? Sounds something like the spoilers and ground effects on the underpowered sub-compact cars I see limping down the interstate.

Understatement.

[Chris_Stankowitz]

Kretchmar is a network engineer for MIT and has gotten a lot of practical experience in managing large networks and unruly hosts.

I'd say, we all know how MIT loves its pranks/hacks. This has to be one intersting and challenging job. Someone should publish a book (or just a website) on the pranks/hacks that happens on their network. For the most part the other pranks are all well documented, bu I'd love to see what these kids cook up for the New Admin.

Re:Understatement.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hacks.mit.edu/

Re:Understatement.

[g_arumilli]

Well, here's one prank that managed to make it's way onto the webpage for an artificial intelligence course that I'm taking. Note that the Head TA's picture has been replaced by Chuck Vest's (MIT president) and the professor's (Patrick Winston) has been replaced by Winston Churchill:

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/

Re:Understatement.

[frenetic3]

Not really that I've seen. Honestly since coming here (I'm a junior, undergrad, comp sci dept.) I've been kind of disappointed -- there are plenty of intelligent (book smart) people, but there aren't really that many truly talented and passionate hacker types (well, at least not that I've met in like the software engineering class [6.170] or other course 6 [comp sci] classes.) Well, there are a couple, but they are REALLY, uh, eccentric or arrogant. The most "innovative" hacks I've seen are like the freaking bathroom/laundry monitors, and those aren't really that impressive (who gives a shit anyway.)

It's too bad. Mostly everyone is so damn busy with the workload that they rarely have time to pursue cool independent projects in their spare time. Which sucks because one would expect that revolutionary new sociological/technological inventions like Napster (northeastern) or Friendster or even cool hacks like BuddyZoo (caltech) etc would be coming out of MIT but from what I've seen that's sadly not the case because everyone is so stressed and maxed out with work.

-fren

Re:Understatement.

[TarpaKungs]

And I quoth:

It's too bad. Mostly everyone is so damn busy with the workload that they rarely have time to pursue cool independent projects in their spare time.

Seems to be the way now. I work for a comp. science university department in the UK - one that has previously turned out the odd significant unix project that was widely used for a time. All I know is that I (and my colleagues) are bogged down solid with providing basic services. I will spend a lot of time to implement well where I can and avoid bodging, but it's not ground breaking stuff - just implementation.

I have serveral ideas in my head right now for cool things, but I would need a decent run at them to get anything useable. I know I won't be able to sustain the input of time into persuing these ideas so I don't bother wasting the time starting - which is a shame, but people these days are expecting more service from no more (or less) staff.

Granted, I could do these in my own time, but with a family on the way I'm prioritising my cool non work ideas over cool work ideas - even getting that time is hard enough.

Re:Understatement.

[SendBot]

The most "innovative" hacks I've seen are like the freaking bathroom/laundry monitors, and those aren't really that impressive

(who gives a shit anyway.)

And thus the utility of the bathroom monitor.
Stall, user, duration, TP used...
logging all this (huhuh, I said 'log'), would tell you who gave various shits with all the ease of your favorite rdbms

Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot???

[adambehnke]

Honestly, Im not being an idiot. There is no way every book out there is a 9/10, excellent, or whatever. Let's take a look:

Last book review, 9/10

Book before that, rated Excellent

Before that, two thumbs up

Oh, MY GOD, an 8!

What gives? Can we get an unbiased review, please?

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[zin]

Maybe they don't post the bad reviews. Who cares about the book you don't wanna read right?

Some of us need something to read...

[csoto]

you know... while "occupied" and um "producing."

Re:$4.50 more at Amazon

[RocketScientist]

BN typically has free shipping on orders of $25 or more, and even so it was only $3.99 waived. BN Readers Advantage is great if you spend more than $250 on books a year (my wife and I spend more than that in any 2 months usually, and we'll easily hit that with christmas presents).

bestbookbuys.com

[iosphere]

I usually pull up bestbookbuys.com to see about the best prices. This book shows up for $23.90 at half.com...

Re:Get it cheaper with froogle

[stephanruby]

$ 28.34 not $24.99.

Check your link again. The first book on your list is not the book we're talking about. The book we're talking about is the fourth down the page you linked to.

Here is another list of all its prices. Barnes and Noble seems to be the better deal if you want it new and Half.com seems to be the better deal if you're willing to get it used.

Re:What with Longhorn in a couple years

[Guillermito]

Why suddenly a lot of people think Longhorn will be sooo great? Just because Microsoft says so?

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

rating 6 - Serious flaws in structure in an otherwise excellent book

http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/10/02/1551210 .s html

and if it doesn't score about a 7 (or whatever the chosen scale) how do you expect anyone to finish reading it to do a review of it? no one (as far as i know) is getting paid to do it, so if it isn't worth reading, they probably won't read it (and therefore not review it)

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[adambehnke]

Actually, it is MORE important to read a negative review. With every publisher, magazine, website out there giving biased "good" reviews, an unbiased negative review says more than all of the others combined...

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[prostoalex]

Unlike traditional media, which has a staff responsible for reviewing new books, Slashdot's book reviews are submitted by users. There is little, if any, incentive, to read the books that are worthless or of little value.

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[jmt9581]

I don't really have a problem with high ratings in book reviews on Slashdot these days, it seems likely that the reviewer really does think that the book deserves 9/10. I think that the lack of low reviews means that people aren't willing to invest resources in buying, reading and reviewing a book that they don't like. I personally will never finish a book that strikes me as low quality. I would also never review a book that I haven't finished.

Judging books before really reading the entire thing is much easier than it sounds. It's very easy to go down to Narnes and Boble and flip through a book and assess it's value within a couple of minutes.

To me, book reviews like this present book reviews to me that I might be interested in. If you really have that much of a problem with the reviews, go find a crappy book yourself and review it. :)

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[DraKKon]

Maybe /. doesn't review bad books... but it would be nice to have someone say, 'Hey this book blows, don't get it...' but then the publishing co. wouldn't send in the free books...

Oak? Where?

[Vrallis]

Okay, I dug around a bit and couldn't find any references to an Oak syslog watcher outside of info about this book. Does anyone have any info about this utility?

Or, better yet, a good recommendation for something to cull through a couple 100k or so syslog entries a day?

Re:Oak? Where?

[losttoy]

http://perl-oak.sourceforge.net/downloads/Oak-1.8. tar.gz

Re:Oak? Where?

[fwr]

Hmm, I used to be a member of the ovforum (it's free) which is a list/group dedicated around HP's OpenView products. A member posted a while back about a type of event/syslog analyzer that he wrote in Perl. You may want to check the archives. I think it was a three letter word starting with a P. Possible PEC, for Perl Event Correlator, or something like that.

Re:Really..

[AshtangiMan]

Sometimes man pages and online help are either a) incomplete (at best), b) slow response, or both (man pages are rarely slow response . . . ;) ). I have not seen the book, and IANAA (author), but the review points to this book as a great reference. I have references that I use all of the time (like PHP and MySQL Web Development 2nd) and being able to quickly find examples of how things happen is invaluable. This is in my experience not as easily available in the form of on-line documentation, (sometimes my on line is an off line), or the sheer volume of matches on google searches. A well written reference by an experienced guru is always better than the so called information super highway (IMHO).

Re:Oak? Where?

[thisissilly]

Two tools you might want to look at: Swatch or SEC

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[cnladd]

Easy answer: people tend to want to share information about the things that they like. Unless someone feels very strongly against something, they're unlikely to spend the time and effort it would take to write a thourough review about it.

Link to files

[trboyden]

Here is a link to the files referenced in the book: http://web.mit.edu/ktools/

Regards,
Timothy Boyden
Systems Administrator
MIT Department of Facilities

Re:Oak? Where?

[lal]

Hmm..I found this Oak also, but it bills itself as "complete framework for designing enterprise applications". I see a syslog reader as part of Oak, but it certainly isn't a pre-built "syslog watcher and digester". Anyone have a pointer to the way that Oak can be used as described in the book review?

Network Admin at MIT...

[MosesJones]

Is there a chapter on hair length, beard trimming and pizza ?

Re:Oak? Where?

[pixelbeat]

Isn't oak a DNS server?
Anyway I found epylog good.

OSS alternative to Group Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Windows fan told me that Group Policy in Windows is a great way to administer a big network (ensuring patching, etc.) and that is why he prefers Microsoft, because there are no similar open source tool.

Does anyone know an OSS alternative to Group Policy with an equivalent feature set?

Thanks

[merryworks4u]

Finally a reference that I can point to for my boss. I am a big fan of open source and freeware tools that get the job done at little to no expense.

Re:Really..

[kfg]

Without putting too fine a point on it, I dare you to find something even rougly equivelent to the content of the Armadillo Book in the man pages and/or online.

Documentation has information. The good books expand this information with experience and wisdom.

Not to mention the fact that you can read them in the park.

KFG

Re:What with Longhorn in a couple years

[Random BedHead Ed]

Microsoft has released a lot of crap software, but in this case if Microsoft is working on a product that won't be out for three years, it probably WILL be good, so the comment that the open source community has to keep OSS better than Windows is quite valid.

Consider:

• Microsoft has significantly increased their development staff. By thoustands of developers. My interpretation of this is that they know very well they weren't much good at this before, and that they've been lucky. And now that they actually have to compete with something for a change, they need more people and a better development process.
• The usual baloney about a database-driven filesystem looks like it's actually real this time. WinFS could be a major feature, since most idiot computer users don't comprehend storage. I know - I do desktop support. An intuitive way to find information is much needed by many less-skilled users. This could be a killer app, and OSS developers should probably try to match it, and beat it, prior to 2006.
• Longhorn looks nicer than XP.
• Supposedly M$ has hired former UNIX developers to improve the command line. So the pitiful DOSlike Windows CLI shell might actually be worth using, connecting to remotely, etc.

OSS developers should recognize Longhorn for what it is: Microsoft trying to be competetive for the first time in years. Don't expect another crap OS from them.

Re:No not Really..

[Alt_Cognito]

This is exactly the attitude that makes the open source community look bad. First, documentation is rarely up to date, even on commercial software, so while books are out of date they can be more comprehensive and illustative then a man page. Books can also tie in technologies together in a way that may not present itself immediately.

Location of the tools

[Maddog]

If you want to take a looksie at the tools, head over to the ktools software page @ http://web.mit.edu/ktools/ Looks like he wrote these himself.

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[Tokerat]

Would you bother to buy, read, and review a book that sucked ass, and could the average /.'er post the article in such a way as to get it submitted?

I can see it now:

New Book Sucks Ass

2/10

goatseman writes: OMFG this book is teh sux0rs. I opened the first chapter and almost puked, it's all confusing and crap. This guy rambles on about irrelevant subjects and you never learn much except stupid factoids. Never buy this book, or anythign from this author. It's way to MS-centric and it violated the DMCA, even though it's about hardware. Read More to read the rest of goatseman's review.

• 2003-10-29 08:41:28 New Book Sucks Ass (news,books) (rejected)

Re:Get it cheaper with froogle

[pbrammer]

Since your price was incorrect, you could always pay $27.95 @ Bookpool.com.

Phil

Re:Really..

[BigBir3d]

irc, mail lists, google, etc, are hard to use when your network is down.

man pages are often incomplete for someone needing the assistance of a book (such as myself). if you know what your doing, then yes, man pages are probably good enough. but some of us are still just learning...

Bad Books Don't Get Finished

[namespan]

Well -- they get published (obviously), but the bad books don't get finished. Hey, I'd assume that bad books don't even make it past the "peruse at Borders/B&N before buying" pass I'd guess that most literate geeks would make before buying. Either way, the books are discarded long before the reader has enough material to write a review on.

MOD PARENT UP

[headkase]

He's absolutely right, now is no time to sit on your laurels.
When Longhorn comes out Linux should be able to not only match it's abilities but hopefully keep surpassing them in some areas.
As a new-to-linux user I kind of wish there was a unified GUI-based system-configuration tool that was a standard across distributions. Then I'd only have to edit text files rarely.

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[Helevius]

I know this reviewer isn't afraid to give bad reviews. However, there's no point in devoting time to bad books. Book reviewers get many books per month and spend their time reading the good ones. The only time a bad review is published is if the reader thinks it will be good, actually buys it, and then feels burnt by his purchase.

On the other hand, Slashdot does publish too many glowing reviews. Good reviews are helpful to publishers and authors but bad for the public. Good luck finding reviewers willing to devote time slogging through bad books, only to look forward to slamming the book when done.

Helevius

MRTG? Why not Cricket?

[JakiChan]

I know that MRTG has been around forever, but these days I think Cricket does a much better job of monitoring your switches and routers since it can track variables like memory and cpu usage. It can also monitor server statistics such as load, memory available, disk usage, and pretty much anything you want to gather from SNMP. I would recommend it over MRTG.

Re:Oak? Where?

[egonh]

It seems as if this oak tool was written by Kretchmar himself: check it out at his page http://web.mit.edu/ktools/www/oak.html

To the mods...

[AKAImBatman]

...Thank you. :-)

BTW, a comment to the original poster: A wise manager gets the best of both worlds by hiring smart people, then talking to them before implementing policies. Thus the need for someone who cries "bullshit!" is diminished and the manager looks like a hero for always doing things right. I think Solomon said it best when he wrote, "A wise man surrounds himself with advisors."

Re:To the mods...

[kfg]

Yes, even the boss would be allowed to talk to The Smart Guy.

In fact, he should be The Smart Guy's best "customer."

KFG

Re:Oak? Where?

[Spirilis]

I also have an old script/program called Swatch in use, watching syslog for certain messages. It executes a script which pages a bunch of cellphones too. You can find tarballs of swatch (search google)

If the Boss is smart, he won't mind finding out...

[sillypixie]

You'll never, ever see this position advertised. Not because it's not a good idea, but because every boss thinks that he's The Smart Guy. He wouldn't be "boss" otherwise. Right?

This is almost right - I think a more accurate portrayal is that every boss expects to be the smart guy, but is afraid to find out ... Turns out I'm the 'Smart Girl' at my company - talk about fun ... but then one of my oh-so-smart ideas was turned into a product, and suddenly, I was 'the boss' and 'the smart girl'. BOOM - the fact that I was the go-to person was overshadowed by the fact that I was a lousy, lousy project manager (unix geeks and microsoft project are a bad, bad combo, blech)... and yet, a group of undeniably intelligent professionals were unwilling to TELL me how much I sucked, so if I hadn't had the wits to figure it out myself, I'd still be inflicting my sad management skills upon their poor heads.

It's easy to be delusional, if you have no-one to help - I think that no boss can also be the smart guy - it's a contradiction in terms (-:... actually, what you REALLY need is for all of your employees to possess that little bit of wit and vision that lets them look outside of normal operating parameters, and see what could be...

Heh, yeah, I'll put that on our next job posting, and see what kind of resumes come in (-:

Pixie

Re:If the Boss is smart, he won't mind finding out

[AKAImBatman]

Errmm... That's pretty round-about logic, but I agree with your basic sentiment. Even the smartest person needs someone to tell them when they're missing the big picture. "Trees through the forest" and all that.

> Heh, yeah, I'll put that on our next job posting, and see what kind of resumes come in (-:

Where are you located? I'm sure we could find a few candidates. :-)

What would that job posting look like, anyways?

[sillypixie]

Smart Guy Wanted: Self-reliant thinker with excellent trouble-shooting skills and the ability to creatively add value in ways no one else has ever thought of. Must have the social skills to effectively communicate the complete and utter stupidity of a planned action to the originator of that action, while simultaneously conceiving of and evangelizing a viable alternative, and doing so without appearing to be threatening in any way.

Must also be able to leap small buildings - this requirement is mandatory, there's quite a distance between the data center and the offices...

*grin*

Pixie

Re:What would that job posting look like, anyways?

[AKAImBatman]

Must also be able to leap small buildings - this requirement is mandatory, there's quite a distance between the data center and the offices...


Is that all? Posh! Let me go whip up some moon shoes on crack and we'll be good to go! ;-)

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[otisg]

Maybe you can be the first and contribute a review for a (technical?) book that is not good enough for an 8 or 9 out of 10.
Sorry if this gets classified as flamebait, but why whine, when you can contribute. This reminds me of people who whine about some open source projects I work on, but are too lazy to even submit a bug report, let along a patch.

Mod thread down

[t0ny]

For a sysadmin, putting "MIT Network Operations" on a resume must feel pretty satisfying

Mod parent down for irrelevant statement.

Re:MRTG? Why not Cricket?

[pHDNgell]

RRD TOOl (sp?) is the successor to MRTG I beleive wich allows the graphing of numerous values, limited only be the clutter created in the graph.

rrdtool is the collection/graphing component. Newer MRTGs just use it. You can do very cool stuff with it.

wise supervisors war story:

[Avihson]

The best officers I served with were the ones that let the Sergeants do their job.

The Sergeant's job is to accomplish the mission, take care of the troops and keep the Captain looking good. When a captain learned that, the unit functioned like a well oiled machine, and esprit de corps was at a peak.

The Sergeants may not have the Master's degrees, but they have just as high IQs as their "superior officers" and the experience that the Officer will never be able to obtain. The Smart Officer leads these men and women toward the objective by asking their advice.

When the Captain thought that he was better, smarter, or more important than his Sergeants, the unit functioned like a typical corporation. Morale sucked, efficiency went out the window as the Captain commanded the unit instead of leading. Micromanagement is bad in Business, but it is deadly in combat.

Re:better than MRTG?

[zin]

How about Concord Network Health, it blow MRTG out of the water and it runs on NT/Solaris/HPUX. HP Openview, Ciscoworks, NetIQ, they are all 100% better than a stupid little MRTG graph. Can you pick different time intervals on the fly? Can you device bits/sec by frame size to see if your getting dos attacked? Seriously freeware isn't all it's cracked up to be and they don't offer a good solution for every probelm. Seriously you going to us MRTG to do bill and accounting on 3,000 customer connections? Can you record just about every mib on a router without pointless hours of scripting out a .cfg file? When it doesn't work who are you going to ask for help?

Re:Why is EVERY book great on /. DUH!!!

[insertionPoint]

What gives? Can we get an unbiased review, please?

The publishers would not give complimentary copies to uncomplementary reviewers, don't you read slashdot?

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[insertionPoint]

I opened the first chapter and almost puked, it's all confusing and crap.

I agree and wanted to comment on the diagrams. I always look at the diagrams in the books at Barnes and Nobles to influence my purchase decisions. Well, these diagrams sucked major ass, but I thought...wow, this is probably an awesome book anyway. NOT! Do not buy "How to run viruses with or without Outlook". I still can't even get a single blip from Blaster out of my RH6.2 machine. Wine sux0rs if they can't even run a simple worm.

Re:What with Longhorn in a couple years

[styrotech]

the Open Source community are going to have to work really hard to make sure they DO stay the best for servers.

So, you think Longhorn is going to take over the server market?

Somehow I don't think Longhorn will do any better than WinXP did as a server.

Re:Why is EVERY book reviewed as great on slashdot

[swordgeek]

Pretty simple. People will read mediocre books (contrary to popular opinion), but won't go to the effort of reviewing anything unless they're madly in love with, or want to warn the world away from.

Since Amazon reviews have become a dime-a-dozen, I find that the 2-9 reviews are usually the most honest and relevant. Rarely do I find something useful in a 10++++ review, nor a 0--- one. Likewise, I very rarely give top marks to anything if I'm reviewing. (exceptions: The Unix System Administrator's Handbook, and Slaughterhouse V.)

It's basically human nature, and I imagine the /. editors would just as soon not bother adding reviews of horrible books anyways.

Rubbish...

[MosesJones]

Hiring smart guys is what you want. You want a team of smart guys who them compete against each other....

And you look miles better while doing less work as the smart guys are competing to do your work as well. Then you can focus on the more important things like golf and sailing.

Smart BTW implies they can also communicate well.

Re:Rubbish...

[kfg]

Of course. The position is primarily a communicative one.

KFG

Re:better than MRTG?

[smitty45]

MRTG is not just a stupid little graph. and yes, it can handle I mentioned RRDTool because it usually goes with MRTG, and can do grouped graphing. can Concord automatically get the average cpu or memory usage of a web server farm ? yes, you can get different time intervals on the fly with MRTG. MRTG isn't meant for billing and accounting, but many tier 1 ISPs use it because it can be basically customized to any heart's content because its source code is all there. when it doesn't work, you ask the guy who wrote it himself, for free, or get up off your ass and fix it yourself. look, whatever works for you, great. i'm not saying MRTG is for everyone. most people use OpenView, CiscoWorks, and NetIQ so they can see bandwidth graphs and get pages when things go down, period. MRTG (and Nagios) does all of that. for no cost of software.

Re:MRTG? Why not Cricket?

[colonwq]

You can monitor disk, memory usage and other items with MRTG without having to use SNMP or MIBs.
Instead of a pair of MIBs on the TARGET you can give path to a script. The format is:
dataI
dataO
system uptime
Text.

I have a TARGET that inventories the total data stored in my tape robot.
Here is the TARGET followed by the example output.
Target[localhost.ROBOT2]: `/root/mrtg/robot.sh`

1455234880
0
0
Robot Free space


:wq

Re:What with Longhorn in a couple years

[hughk]

Microsoft has significantly increased their development staff. By thoustands of developers.

Have you ever read The Mythical Man Month. Adding developers does not necessarily improve a project, indeed it can a) reduce productivity and b) quality. I would say that from their products, Microsoft's real problem is engineering management (and a lack of ethics, but thats another issue). Between N team members, there are (N-1)^2 paths of communication (or opportunities for miscommunication).

As for your other issues, well WinFS may be interesting because finally we enough horse power to drive it. There have been plenty of attempts to do this before, for example, MUMPS which was orihginally a dedicated operating system (built around RSX-11M) sitting on top of a database file system.

The system was quite nice for certain kinds of applications and it eas very sucessful for medical book-keeping. However, the user only saw complete applications, not the raw database.

As for the Look, well we should wait a little there. Personally, I don't like the cost of XP's flashy GUI - the processor and memory cost.

As for the command line, we shall see. Unix processes are lightweight, the NT kenel's aren't (XP is still essentially an NT Kernel). Unix commands are built around the assumption that it doesn't matter if you fire up half a dozen processes to solve a small problem. I see some conceptual problems there.

good unix books

[underpaidISPtech]

The reviewer says: "I still have to recommend The Unix System Administration Handbook first, however."

I disagree. I have the "purple" book, otherwise known as the third edition, and I bought it after reading on /. about how great this book is.

It's not. It's about as informative as reading any number of equally expensive, weighty, yet shitty books put out by SAMS or QUE. Honestly, it was the biggest dissapointment, and I would never recommend it to anyone. In the three years since I purchased it, I have consulted it maybe ten times.

The coverage of Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris is shallow and nothing is ever explored in any real depth. Mostly, it is full of anecdotal stories that leave you feeling like you just stepped into an introductory unix seminar hosted by hoary old geeks.

IMO, The Unix System Administration Handbook is highly overrated.

Instead, I would suggest that anyone interested in reading an excellent, informative and useful UNIX book pick up a copy of this book. I've been using linux for about 5 years now, and this book is part of my coursework at college, and i've learned more about unix from this one book than all the crappy SAMS and QUE tomes combined.

Well worth the money.

Re:What with Longhorn in a couple years

[Rick the Red]

You don't get it. Few people do.

Longhorn changes everything. For users (read: Fortune 500 employees) to get maximum benifit from Longhorn, their applications will need to be optimized for Longhorn. It wouldn't do if, on Longhorn's launch date, the only Longhorn application was Microsoft Office for Longhorn. They need Adobe and Norton and, yes, even Real and Sun to release Longhorn-enabled apps on the Longhorn launch date. Thus the long lead time. Only Microsoft or Apple are large enough to pull this off, and look how long it took to get all the MacIntosh apps ported to OS/X. If IBM announced a new OS how many years do you think it would take for apps to show up for it? Remember OS/2?

The fact that there's such a long lead time for Longhorn is an indication of just how different it is. Remember, it doesn't use NTFS, it uses SQL Server to store all your files. I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if Longhorn will run Windows applications but Windows won't be able to run Longhorn applications.