Linux Administration Handbook

“As this book shows, Linux systems are just as functional, secure, and reliable as their proprietary counterparts. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of thousands of Linux developers, Linux is more ready than ever for deployment at the frontlines of the real world. The authors of this book know that terrain well, and I am happy to leave you in their most capable hands.”
—Linus Torvalds

“The most successful sysadmin book of all time—because it works!”
—Rik Farrow, editor of ;login:

“This book clearly explains current technology with the perspective of decades of experience in large-scale system administration. Unique and highly recommended.”
—Jonathan Corbet, cofounder, LWN.net

“Nemeth et al. is the overall winner for Linux administration: it’s intelligent, full of insights, and looks at the implementation of concepts.”
—Peter Salus, editorial director, Matrix.net

Since 2001, Linux Administration Handbook has been the definitive resource for every Linux system administrator who must efficiently solve technical problems and maximize the reliability and performance of a production environment. Now, the authors have systematically updated this classic guide to address today’s most important Linux distributions and most powerful new administrative tools.

The authors spell out detailed best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, web hosting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, and much more. Sysadmins will especially appreciate the thorough and up-to-date discussions of such difficult topics such as DNS, LDAP, security, and the management of IT service organizations.

Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition, reflects the current versions of these leading distributions:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Fedora Core
• SUSE Linux Enterprise
• Debian GNU/Linux
• Ubuntu Linux

Sharing their war stories and hard-won insights, the authors capture the behavior of Linux systems in the real world, not just in ideal environments. They explain complex tasks in detail and illustrate these tasks with examples drawn from their extensive hands-on experience.

Evi Nemeth is retired from the computer science faculty at the University of Colorado and is a senior staff member in network research at CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Garth Snyder has worked at NeXT and Sun and holds a degree in electrical engineering from Swarthmore College. He recently received an M.D./M.B.A. from the University of Rochester.

Trent R. Hein is the cofounder of Applied Trust Engineering, a company that provides network infrastructure security and performance consulting services. Trent holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado.