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“As an author, editor, and publisher, I never paid much attention to the competition–except in a few cases. This is one of those cases. The UNIX System Administration Handbook is one of the few books we ever measured ourselves against.”
–From the Foreword by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media
“This book is fun and functional as a desktop reference. If you use UNIX and Linux systems, you need this book in your short-reach library. It covers a bit of the systems’ history but doesn’t bloviate. It’s just straightfoward information delivered in colorful and memorable fashion.”
–Jason A. Nunnelley
“This is a comprehensive guide to the care and feeding of UNIX and Linux systems. The authors present the facts along with seasoned advice and real-world examples. Their perspective on the variations among systems is valuable for anyone who runs a heterogeneous computing facility.”–Pat Parseghian
The twentieth anniversary edition of the world’s best-selling UNIX system administration book has been made even better by adding coverage of the leading Linux distributions: Ubuntu, openSUSE, and RHEL.
This book approaches system administration in a practical way and is an invaluable reference for both new administrators and experienced professionals. It details best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, email, web hosting, scripting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, virtualization, DNS, security, management of IT service organizations, and much more. UNIX® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition, reflects the current versions of these operating systems:
Ubuntu® Linux
openSUSE® Linux
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®
Oracle America® Solaris™ (formerly Sun Solaris)
HP HP-UX®
IBM AIX®
Foreword xlii
Preface xliv
Acknowledgments xlvi
Section One: Basic Administration
Chapter 1: Where to Start 3
Essential duties of the system administrator 4
Suggested background 6
Friction between UNIX and Linux 7
Linux distributions 9
Example systems used in this book 10
System-specific administration tools 13
Notation and typographical conventions 13
Units 14
Man pages and other on-line documentation 16
Other authoritative documentation 18
Other sources of information 20
Ways to find and install software 21
System administration under duress 26
Recommended reading 27
Exercises 28
Chapter 2: Scripting and the Shell 29
Shell basics 30
bash scripting 37
Regular expressions 48
Perl programming 54
Python scripting 66
Scripting best practices 73
Recommended reading 74
Exercises 76
Chapter 3: Booting and Shutting Down 77
Bootstrapping 78
Booting PCs 82
GRUB: The GRand Unified Boot loader 83
Booting to single-user mode 86
Working with startup scripts 87
Booting Solaris 97
Rebooting and shutting down 100
Exercises 102
Chapter 4: Access Control and Rootly Powers 103
Traditional UNIX access control 104
Modern access control 106
Real-world access control 110
Pseudo-users other than root 118
Exercises 119
Chapter 5: Controlling Processes 120
Components of a process 120
The life cycle of a process 123
Signals 124
kill: send signals 127
Process states 128
nice and renice: influence scheduling priority 129
ps: monitor processes 130
Dynamic monitoring with top, prstat, and topas 133
The /proc filesystem 135
strace, truss, and tusc: trace signals and system calls 136
Runaway processes 138
Recommended reading 139
Exercises 139
Chapter 6: The Filesystem 140
Pathnames 142
Filesystem mounting and unmounting 143
The organization of the file tree 145
File types 147
File attributes 152
Access