Olaf Kirch and Terry Dawson
£23 approximately
24
Chapters and four appendices in 455 Pages.
Contents
Preface
Chapters
1 Introduction to Networking
2 Issues of TCP/IP Networking
3 Configuring the Networking Hardware
4 Configuring the Serial Hardware
5 Configuring TCP/IP Networking
6 Name Service and Resolver Configuration
7 Serial Line IP
8 The Point to Point Protocol
9 TCP/IP Firewall
10 IP Accounting
11 IP Masquerade and Network Address Translation
12 Important Network Features
13 The Network Information System
14 The Network File System
15 IPX and The NCP Filesystem
16 Managing Taylor UUCP
17 Electronic Mail
18 Sendmail
19 Getting Exim Up and Running
20 Netnews
21 C News
22 NNTP and the NNTPD Daemon
23 Internet News
24 Newsreader Configuration
Appendix A
Example network: The Virtual Brewery.
Appendix B:
Useful Cable Configurations.
Appendix C
Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second
Edition Copyright Information.
Appendix D
Sage: The System Administrators Guild.
Synopsis
As is usual with O'Reilly, this is a book that tries to be all things. The authors are known for their helpful comments on the internet and with their concerns about network security. They like to help people to understand things. There are some good examples of what to do with your network and why something may or may not work.
Review
Unix has always been a network aware computing environment. Plug two machines together with a piece of network cable and you'll find that out. Network Administrators Guide is probably good for people who have a home network or a small network in the office. It takes you along from Running Linux and gives you a few more clues about what comes next. There are odd pages of advanced topics but most of it is the bread and butter network admin stuff that many system administrators spend twenty years or more working on.
Chapter one gives an excellent introduction to networking. Kind of thing that your average University lecturer would get wrong. Chapter two goes into some issues to do with TCP/IP networking. Extremely useful for people who may not know. This includes some very experienced administrators. On arriving at Chapter six there is a superb explanation of how DNS and Named works. None of this is is available in most places. Chapter nine gives some simple examples of the use of an IP firewall. This *is* only introductory. You should really look towards a separate book on the subject in order to understand firewalls. At the time of writing this review the 2.4 kernel has only just been released and IPTABLES isn't really in use anywhere. For more info and some basic concepts chapter twelve is good to read. Important network features like the inetd super server and tcpd access control are basic requirements to understand what to do next.
Network file system is covered in chapter fourteen. Most people use NFS at some time to transfer files or perform some other task.
I found the chapters on Exim and Sendmail to be lacking in quantity and detail. Sendmail.cf configuration is not for the nervous. Lots of help is needed and any amount of docs may not help the would-be administrator. Similarly Exim is also difficult to configure of you haven't done it before.
All in all, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone looking to learn about network administration. If you've ever read an O'Reilly book before, you'll know what to expect: this is another quality title in the O'Reilly stable. For those who've never read an O'Reilly title, this is a great place to start!
Colophon
" The cover image of a cowboy is adapted from a 19th century engraving from Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River, by William Thayer (The Henry Bill Publishing Co., Norwich, CT, 1888). Lar Kaufman suggested the western theme for O'Reilly's Linux series."
Obviously nothing to do with the cowboy operator from hell ??
Review by
Richard Ibbotson
