In article , Yousaf wrote:
>Can anyone recommend me a good Linux System Admin book?

"a" book??? There are fifteen books between the monitors in front
of me, and another bookcase behind me with eleven additional books
on *nix, nevermind the system manuals, etc.

>I consider myself a beginner in system administration, I know the
>fundamental concepts.

OK - have you started with the free stuff at the Linux Documentation
Project? Look at http://tldp.org/guides.html

There is a huge amount of stuff in the 470+ different HOWTOs.

>I had a look at the following on amazon:
>
>Linux Administration Handbook
>Linux in a Nutshell

I have the nutshell, but it's not a learning book. It assumes you already
know the command, and want to quickly check syntax. In theory, it's not
much better than the man pages, though I would be inconvenienced without
it.

>Linux Cookbook

I was never thrilled with 'cookbook' style books. Most that I've tried
have been lacking the substance.

>I want a tutorial style book with examples etc.

The one I learned on was 'Essential System Administration' by Aeleen Frisch
from O'Reilly. Actually, most of the books I have are from them. See
www.oreilly.com. A close second as a good publisher is Addison Wesley.

>Can anyone tell me which one would be the ideal book to buy

1. Which is the ideal ice cream? Think about that.
2. There is no single book that does it all. There _can't_ be. Just doing
a page count on the HOWTOs gives 11,900 equivalent pages. I wouldn't
even hazard a guess how much material is in the man pages.

>also if there is an online alternative that would be great as well.

See above. One suggestion - whenever you do something new, or even
something that you are going to need to reuse in one form or another,
WRITE IT DOWN - stick it in a file or something. Include some comments
so you know why you did what.

[compton ~]$ wc -l scripts
1099 scripts
[compton ~]$

I have no idea if I'll ever reuse everything that I've stuck into that
file - but it's there if I need it. Things like:

[compton ~]$ ls `echo $PATH | tr ':' ' '` | wc -l
1310
[compton ~]$ echo $HISTSIZE
1000
[compton ~]$ history | sed 's/^......//' | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//' |
cut -d' ' -f1 | sort -u | wc -l
75
[compton ~]$

TRANSLATION: There are about 1300 commands in my path. My shell remembers
the last 1000 commands. In this terminal, of the last 1000 commands I've
used (and the line beginning with 'history' and ending with 'wc -l' is
considered one command by the history, although it contains seven different
commands chained together), I've used just 75 different commands , (For
root, the last I checked, it was about 85 out of 1630.)

>Red Hat 9 (Shrike)
>Linux version 2.4.20-8

That hasn't been updated since it got out of the box. There have been
eight kernel updates _alone_ from RH. If you are going to be keeping
that system much longer, I'd make sure to hit the RH errata site while
they still _have_ the errata available (they may disappear at the end
of October). Also, download.fedoralegacy.org has _SOME_ additional
errata (two were released yesterday).

I see you posted an identical article to alt.os.linux. Please don't
multipost - if you MUST post to more than one group, include all of
the newsgroups in the 'Newsgroups:' header, separating them with a
comma. That way, people only have to download one copy of your post.

Old guy

Moe Trin wrote:

>
> I see you posted an identical article to alt.os.linux. Please don't
> multipost - if you MUST post to more than one group, include all of
> the newsgroups in the 'Newsgroups:' header, separating them with a
> comma. That way, people only have to download one copy of your post.


Sorry, I always thought that putting all the newsgroup names in the header
is multiposting! Well there you go, you learn something new every day.

Thanks for the detailed reply, I have already downloaded a few books from
tldp site. I must admit that it is a wonderful site with all the
information I need to begin with.

I am awaiting a stable Fedora release, by stable I mean with a stable 2.6
kernel. For me it will be stable when it reaches 2.6.15 or higher.

Yousaf
--
Red Hat 9 (Shrike)
Linux version 2.4.20-8
gcc version 3.2.2

In article <-sydnd_Bc9qFjsDcRVn-gw@eclipse.net.uk>, Yousaf wrote:
>I always thought that putting all the newsgroup names in the header
>is multiposting!

No, all in one (no more than five, or you wind up in killfiles as a
spammer) is called 'cross-posting'. Within limits, that's OK, and is
always preferred to posting the same article individually in multiple
groups - hence the name 'multi-post'.

>I have already downloaded a few books from tldp site. I must admit that
>it is a wonderful site with all the information I need to begin with.

The material there is actually pretty good, too. I've been using *nix
for a long time, and yet I am learning new tricks from TheGrendal's
abs-guide.

>I am awaiting a stable Fedora release, by stable I mean with a stable 2.6
>kernel. For me it will be stable when it reaches 2.6.15 or higher.

[compton ~]$ finger kernel@kernel.org
[kernel.org]
The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.8.1
The latest prepatch for the stable Linux kernel tree is: 2.6.9-rc3
The latest snapshot for the stable Linux kernel tree is: 2.6.9-rc3-bk1
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.27
The latest prepatch for the 2.4 Linux kernel tree is: 2.4.28-pre3
The latest snapshot for the 2.4 Linux kernel tree is: 2.4.28-pre3-bk6
The latest 2.2 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.26
The latest prepatch for the 2.2 Linux kernel tree is: 2.2.27-pre2
The latest 2.0 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.0.40
The latest -mm patch to the stable Linux kernels is: 2.6.9-rc2-mm4
[compton ~]$

You _may_ have a bit of a wait. And don't forget that 1.0 only went up
to 1.0.9 (although there was a 1.0.pl15), and 1.2 stopped at 1.2.13
before 2.0 took over. Remember that 2.6.x has been out since last
December. Yes, I do have some systems running 2.0.40 - why do you
ask? ;-) Actually, a better indication of "stable" might be when
2.7.0 is announced. It's taking longer than I expected.

Old guy