LincolnBlogs

Automating Linux and Unix System Administration

I was asked to make sure I wrote some reviews of my recent review material this time 🙂 so here ’tis: This book, from APress, Nate Campi and Kirk Bauer is pretty good.

This book gives decent information and goes through a lot of the thralls of basic systems administration of Debian, Solaris and RedHat based systems. The tools that are repetitively used in the book for this are ssh, which we (should) all know and love, and cfengine, which is a “pull” method of getting things done on your boxen. The book goes over many tasks that a sysadmin may have to do and specifically mentions how you might use cfengine to help.

As a sysadmin myself, I can attest to the importance of a lot of the information in the book, however, I do not personally use cfengine. The background information provided on what system administrators really do is going to be invaluable to new SA’s, so if you are in that category, read this and pay attention to that even if not interested in the “technical details”. A lot of books on these subjects tend to be quite wordy where this one is a bit more concise and practical.

This book will make a good refresher/reminder for the experienced sysadmin, a good introduction for the new guy, and a good reference for the cfengine user.