Preface
This book is an agglomeration of lean-tos and annexes and
there is no knowing how big the next addition will be, or where it
will be put. At any point, I can call the book finished or
unfinished. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. —Paul Valery
This book covers the fundamental and essential tasks of Unix system
administration. Although it includes information designed for people
new to system administration, its contents extend well beyond the
basics. The primary goal of this book is to make system
administration on Unix systems straightforward; it does so by
providing you with exactly the information you need. As I see it,
this means finding a middle ground between a general overview that is
too simple to be of much use to anyone but a complete novice, and a
slog through all the obscurities and eccentricities that only a
fanatic could love (some books actually suffer from both these
conditions at the same time). In other words, I
won't leave you hanging when the first complication
arrives, and I also won't make you wade through a
lot of extraneous information to find what actually matters.
This book approaches system administration from a task-oriented
perspective, so it is organized around various facets of the system
administrator's job, rather than around the features
of the Unix operating system, or the workings of the hardware
subsystems in a typical system, or some designated group of
administrative commands. These are the raw materials and tools of
system administration, but an effective administrator has to know
when and how to apply and deploy them. You need to have the ability,
for example, to move from a user's complaint
("This job only needs 10 minutes of CPU time, but it
takes it three hours to get it!") through a
diagnosis of the problem ("The system is thrashing
because there isn't enough swap
space"), to the particular command that will solve
it (swap or swapon).
Accordingly, this book covers all facets of Unix system
administration: the general concepts, underlying structure, and
guiding assumptions that define the Unix environment, as well as the
commands, procedures, strategies, and policies essential to success
as a system administrator. It will talk about all the usual
administrative tools that Unix provides and also how to use them more
smartly and efficiently.
Naturally, some of this information will constitute advice about
system administration; I won't be shy about letting
you know what my opinion is. But I'm actually much
more interested in giving you the information you need to make
informed decisions for your own situation than in providing a single,
univocal view of the "right way" to
administer a Unix system. It's more important that
you know what the issues are concerning, say, system backups, than
that you adopt anyone's specific philosophy or
scheme. When you are familiar with the problem and the potential
approaches to it, you'll be in a position to decide
for yourself what's right for your system.
Although this book will be useful to anyone who takes care of a Unix
system, I have also included some material designed especially for
system administration professionals. Another way that this book
covers essential system administration is that it tries to convey the
essence of what system administration is, as well as a way of
approaching it when it is your job or a significant part thereof.
This encompasses intangibles such as system administration as a
profession, professionalism (not the same thing), human and humane
factors inherent in system administration, and its relationship to
the world at large. When such issues are directly relevant to the
primary, technical content of the book, I mention them. In addition,
I've included other information of this sort in
special sidebars (the first one comes later in this Preface). They
are designed to be informative and thought-provoking and are, on
occasion, deliberately provocative.
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