The Practice of System and Network Administration

by Limoncelli, Thomas A.; Hogan, Christina J.; Chalup, Strata R.

• ISBN13: 9780321492661
• ISBN10: 0321492668
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-05
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

The first edition ofThe Practice of System and Network Administrationintroduced a generation of system and network administrators to a modern IT methodology. Whether you use Linux, Unix, or Windows, this newly revised edition describes the essential practices previously handed down only from mentor to protege. This wonderfully lucid, often funny cornucopia of information introduces beginners to advanced frameworks valuable for their entire career, yet is structured to help even the most advanced experts through difficult projects. The book's four major sections build your knowledge with the foundational elements of system administration. These sections guide you through better techniques for upgrades and change management, catalog best practices for IT services, and explore various management topics. Chapters are divided into The Basics and The Icing. When you get the Basics right it makes every other aspect of the job easier--such as automating the right things first. The Icing sections contain all the powerful things that can be done on top of the basics to wow customers and managers. Inside, you'll find advice on topics such as The key elements your networks and systems need in order to make all other services run better Building and running reliable, scalable services, including web, storage, email, printing, and remote access Creating and enforcing security policies Upgrading multiple hosts at one time without creating havoc Planning for and performing flawless scheduled maintenance windows Managing superior helpdesks and customer care Avoiding the "temporary fix" trap Building data centers that improve server uptime Designing networks for speed and reliability Web scaling and security issues Why building a backup system isn't about backups Monitoring what you have and predicting what you will need How technically oriented workers can maintain their job's technical focus (and avoid an unwanted management role) Technical management issues, including morale, organization building, coaching, and maintaining positive visibility Personal skill techniques, including secrets for getting more done each day, ethical dilemmas, managing your boss, and loving your job System administration salary negotiation It's no wonder the first edition received Usenix SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award! This eagerly anticipated second edition updates this time-proven classic: Chapters reordered for easier navigation Thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback Plus three entirely new chapters: Web Services, Data Storage, and Documentation

Author Biography

Thomas A. Limoncelli is a noted system and network administrator employed at Google. He speaks at conferences worldwide on a variety of topics.

Christina J. Hogan has more than ten years' system administration experience. She now works at the BMW Sauber F1 team as an aerodynamicist.

Strata R. Chalup is a twenty-year veteran of system administration and technical project management. She is the founder of Virtual.Net, Inc.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xxv
Acknowledgments	p. xxxv
About the Authors	p. xxxvii
Getting Started	p. 1
What to Do When . . .	p. 3
Climb Out of the Hole	p. 27
Foundation Elements	p. 39
Workstations	p. 41
Servers	p. 69
Services	p. 95
Data Centers	p. 129
Networks	p. 187
Namespaces	p. 223
Documentation	p. 241
Disaster Recovery and Data Integrity	p. 261
Security Policy	p. 271
Ethics	p. 323
Helpdesks	p. 343
Customer Care	p. 363
Change Processes	p. 389
Debugging	p. 391
Fixing Things Once	p. 405
Change Management	p. 415
Server Upgrades	p. 435
Service Conversions	p. 457
Maintenance Windows	p. 473
Centralization and Decentralization	p. 501
Providing Services	p. 521
Service Monitoring	p. 523
Email Service	p. 543
Print Service	p. 565
Data Storage	p. 583
Backup and Restore	p. 619
Remote Access Service	p. 653
Software Depot Service	p. 667
Web Services	p. 689
Management Practices	p. 725
Organizational Structures	p. 727
Perception and Visibility	p. 751
Being Happy	p. 777
A Guide for Technical Managers	p. 819
A Guide for Nontechnical Managers	p. 853
Hiring System Administrators	p. 871
Firing System Administrators	p. 899
Epilogue	p. 909
Appendixes	p. 911
The Many Roles of a System Administrator	p. 913
Acronyms	p. 939
Bibliography	p. 945
Index	p. 955
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Our goal for this book has been to write down everything we've learned from our mentors and to add our real-world experiences. These things are beyond what the manuals and the usual system administration books teach. This book was born from our experiences as SAs in a variety of organizations. We have started new companies. We have helped sites to grow. We have worked at small start-ups and universities, where lack of funding was an issue. We have worked at midsize and large multinationals, where mergers and spin-offs gave rise to strange challenges. We have worked at fast-paced companies that do business on the Internet and where high-availability, high performance, and scaling issues were the norm. We've worked at slow-paced companies at which high tech meant cordless phones. On the surface, these are very different environments with diverse challenges; underneath, they have the same building blocks, and the same fundamental principles apply. This book gives you a framework--a way of thinking about system administration problems--rather than narrow how-to solutions to particular problems. Given a solid framework, you can solve problems every time they appear, regardless of the operating system (OS), brand of computer, or type of environment. This book is unique because it looks at system administration from this holistic point of view; whereas most other books for SAs focus on how to maintain one particular product. With experience, however, all SAs learn that the big-picture problems and solutions are largely independent of the platform. This book will change the way you approach your work as an SA. The principles in this book apply to all environments. The approaches described may need to be scaled up or down, depending on your environment, but the basic principles still apply. Where we felt that it might not be obvious how to implement certain concepts, we have included sections that illustrate how to apply the principles at organizations of various sizes. This book is not about how to configure or debug a particular OS and will not tell you how to recover the shared libraries or DLLs when someone accidentally moves them. Some excellent books cover those topics, and we refer you to many of them throughout. Instead, we discuss the principles, both basic and advanced, of good system administration that we have learned through our own and others' experiences. These principles apply to all OSs. Following them well can make your life a lot easier. If you improve the way you approach problems, the benefit will be multiplied. Get the fundamentals right, and everything else falls into place. If they aren't done well, you will waste time repeatedly fixing the same things, and your customers 1 will be unhappy because they can't work effectively with broken machines. Who Should Read This Book This book is written for system administrators at all levels. It gives junior SAs insight into the bigger picture of how sites work, their roles in the organizations, and how their careers can progress. Intermediate SAs will learn how to approach more complex problems and how to improve their sites and make their jobs easier and their customers happier. Whatever level you are at, this book will help you to understand what is behind your day-to-day work, to learn the things that you can do now to save time in the future, to decide policy, to be architects and designers, to plan far into the future, to negotiate with vendors, and to interface with management. These are the things that concern senior SAs. None of them are listed in an OS's manual. Even senior SAs and systems architects can learn from our experiences and those of our colleagues, just as we have learned from each other in writing this book. We also cover several management topics for SA trying to understand their managers, for SAs who aspire to move into management, and for SAs finding themselves doing more a