The Practice of System and Network Administration
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The goal of this book is to write down all the things that we've learned from our mentors and our real-world experiences. These are the things that are beyond what the manuals and the usual system administration books teach. System administrators (SAs) often find themselves swamped with work, struggling to keep the site running, and faced with requests for new technologies from their customers. Servers are overloaded or unreliable, but fixing the problem requires weeks of planning and painstakingly untangling a mess of services so that they can be moved to new machines. Hidden dependencies are lurking around every corner, and getting bitten by one can be catastrophic. In the meantime, repetitive day-to-day tasks still need to be done. The challenges seem insurmountable. Most sites grow organically, with little thought given to the big picture as each little change is implemented. Haphazardly, SAs learn about the fundamentals of good site design and support practices. They are taught by mentors, if at all, about the importance of simplicity, clarity, generality, automation, communication, and doing the basics first. These six principles are recurring themes in this book. Simplicity means that the smallest solution that solves the entire problem is the best solution. It keeps the systems easy to understand and reduces complex interactions between components that can cause debugging nightmares. Clarity means that the solution is not convoluted. It can be easily explained to someone on the project or even outside the project. Clarity makes it easier to change the system, as well as to maintain and debug it. Generality means that the solution solves many problems at once. Sometimes the most general solution is the simplest. It also means using vendor-independent open standard protocols that make systems more exible and make it easier to link software packages together for better services. Automation is critical. Manual processes cannot be repeated accurately nor do they scale as well as automated processes. Automation is key to easing the system administration burden, and it eliminates tedious repetitive tasks and gives SAs more time to improve services. Communication between the right people can solve more problems than hardware or software. You need to communicate well with other SAs and with your customers. It is your responsibility to initiate communication. Communication ensures that everyone is working toward the same goals. Lack of communication leaves people concerned and annoyed. Communication also includes documentation: document customers needs to make sure you agree on them, document design decisions you make, document maintenance procedures. Documentation makes systems easier to maintain and upgrade. Good communication and proper documentation also make it easier to hand off projects and maintenance when you leave or take on a new role. Doing the basics first means that you build the site on strong foundations by identifying and solving the basic problems before trying to attack more advanced ones. Doing the basics first makes adding advanced features considerably easier, and it makes services more robust. A good basic infrastructure can be repeatedly leveraged to improve the site with relatively little effort. Sometimes we see SAs at other sites making a huge effort to solve a problem that wouldn't exist, or would be a simple enhancement, if the site had a basic infrastructure in place. This book will help you identify what the basics are and show you how the other five principles apply. Each chapter looks at the basics of a given area. Get the fundamentals right, and everything else will fall into place. These principles are universal. They apply at all levels of the system. They apply to physical networks and to computer hardware. They apply to all operating systems running at the site, all protocols used, all software, and all services provided. They apply at universities, non-profit institutions, government sites, businesses, and Internet service sites. What Is an SA? It's difficult to define what a system administrator is. Every company calls SAs something different. Sometimes they are called network administrators, system architects, or operators. Maybe the name isn't important a rose by any other name . . . Explaining What System Administration Entails It's difficult to define system administration, but trying to explain it to a nontechnical person is even more difficult, especially if that person is your mom. Moms have the right to know how their offspring are paying their rent. A friend of Christine's always had trouble explaining to his mother what he did for a living and ended up giving a different answer every time she asked. Therefore she kept repeating the question every couple of months, waiting for an answer that would be meaningful to her. Then he started working for WebTV. When the product became available, he bought one for his Mom. From then on, he told her that he made sure that her WebTV service was working and was as fast as possible. She was very happy that she could now show her friends something and say, "That's what my son does!" System administrators do many things. They look after computers, networks, and the people who use them. An SA may look after hardware, operating systems, software, configurations, applications, or security. A system administrator is someone who influences how effectively other people can use their computers and networks. System Administration Matters System administration matters because computers and networks matter. Computers are a lot more important than they were years ago. What happened? First of all, the technology has changed. Corporate computers used to be independent, now they are connected. Business processes used to have a component that involved using a computer, now entire processes are done online and come to a halt if any part of the system is broken. The widespread use of the Internet, intranets, and the move to a dot com world has redefined the way companies depend on computers. The Internet is a 24 x 7 operation, and sloppy operations can no longer be tolerated. A paper purchase order can be processed any time, anywhere; therefore there is an expectation that the computer system that automates the process will be available all the time, from anywhere. Nightly maintenance windows have become an unheard of luxury. That unreliable power system in the machine room that caused occasional but bearable problems now prevents sales from being recorded. The biggest change, however, is due to CEOs putting a new importance on computing. In business, nothing is important unless the CEO feels it is important. The CEO controls funding and sets priorities. Now CEOs have become dependent on email. They notice when an outage or an overloaded system slows down their email. The massive preparations for Y2K also brought home to CEOs how dependent their organizations have become on computers. We use the term chief executive officer (CEO) loosely to mean the top person in an organization. Educational institutions have CEOs, they're just referred to as president, provost, proctor, or head. Governments have CEOs they're just referred to as mayor, governor, Prime Minister, leader, or President. Management now has a more realistic view of computers. Previously people had unrealistic ideas of what computers could do; seeing them as portrayed in film: big, all-knowing, self-sufficient, miracle machines. This has changed. Even the need for SAs is now portrayed in films. In 1993, Jurassic Park (Crichton 1993) was the first mainstream movie to portray computers as needing system administration, leading to a better public understanding of what it is. Computers matter more than ever. If computers are to work and work well, then system administration matters. We matter. About the Book This book was born from our experiences as SAs in a variety of 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 mid-size and large multinationals, where mergers and spin-offs give rise to more challenges. We ve worked at fast-paced companies that do business on the Internet and have high-availability, high-performance, and rapid scaling issues. On the surface, these are very different environments with diverse challenges. But underneath, they all need 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 a narrow how-to solution to a particular problem. Given a solid framework, you can solve problems every time they appear, no matter what operating system (OS), brand of computer, or type of environment. This book is unique because it looks at system administration from this point of view, whereas most books for SAs focus on how to maintain one particular type of OS. 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 and the way you view the site you maintain. 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. In chapters where we felt that how to apply the information to other environments might not be obvious, we have included a section that illustrates how to apply the principles at different companies. This book is not about how to configure or debug a particular OS. It will not tell you how to recover the shared libraries or DLLs when someone accidentally moves them. There are some excellent books that do cover those topics, and we will refer you to many of them throughout the book. What we will discuss here ar...
Book Info
(Pearson Education) Explains network administration and how it works, without focusing on any specific platform or technology. Discusses change management, revision control, server upgrades, maintenance windows, and service conversions as part of system administration. Softcover. DLC: Computer networks--Management.
The Practice of System and Network Administration
The Practice of System and Network Administration,Thomas A. Limoncelli,Christine Hogan,Addison-Wesley Professional,0201702711,Computer Bks - General Information,Computer Books: General,Computer Network Management,Computer networks,Computer systems,Computers,Management,Management Information Systems,Networking - General,Computers / Networking / General
The Practice of System and Network Administration
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