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Summary: One of the best...
Review: ... linux books I've read in a long time. The more time I spend with Linux (6 years now) the less I find useful in book offerings. Too many books are written with the new user only in mind, no thought given to the intermediate to advanced user. While many of the things in the book appear elsewhere on the web and print, this is the first volume I've seen that brings it all together in a cogent and succinct package. Kudo's to the authors and to O'reilly for putting this book out.
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Summary: Lots of Wonderful "Tips & Tricks"
Review: Being a one-time "Sys Admin," I can appreciate the drudgery of numerous system tasks. This book offers a number of tricks (or "hacks) to make some of these tasks a little less dreary. There are several sections (Server Basics, Revision Control, Backups, and Networking to name a few), along with lots of these tricks. Since I'm a mp3 fan, I especially liked the ones about CDR's and burning a CD without creating an ISO file!This book is a collection of various hacks that probably would take you forever to find (and what sys admin has any time anyway?) if they weren't in this book. There's probably many more out there that are undocumented, but these 100 were the ones the authors considered the best ones. This book is the first in a series of "Hacks" books by O'Reilly and I'm looking forward to the subsequent ones.
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Summary: Good Production Level Information
Review: Finally, a good book on production level tips/tricks to help all of us poor, misunderstood and struggling Sys Admins out there (these are the jokes - chuckle, chuckle ya'll). Honestly, good stuff. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is - IT'S NOT ENOUGH! I hope this is the first of many, more bulky editions to come. Thanks Rob Flickenger, but I know you're holding back the really cool stuff buddy - 8-).
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Summary: Quick and Handy Linux Admin's Guide
Review: Gives clear and succint solutions to a set of common problems that Linux admins or users may run into. I like the cookbook style approach and the concise format.
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Summary: An ax worth having
Review: I can't help myself not to begin this review with a big *thanks* to O'Reilly for choosing Linux to launch this new series.
First thing that crossed my mind after opening this tiny book, was a notion of close resemblance with another O'Reilly book that I read recently, "Unix Power Tools". Book is organized in almost identical way, short articles (anything from a page or two, to several pages) that are presented with a clear writing style, examples and efficient layout. Articles are cross-referenced in such a way that you can easily start reading the book from whatever end you wish.
The hacks that I like the most are those in chapters on Server Basics, Backups, SSH and Information Servers (BIND, Apache, MySQL, OpenSSL). If you're hardcore Linux sysadmin you'll probably appreciate hacks in other chapters too; Networking, Revision Control and Monitoring. For me, the most challenging hacks in this book are the ones that deal with tunneling (IPIP/GRE encapsulation, vtun over SSH), due to complete lack of experience on my side, otherwise I found the book well worth the price and time to read, even if you'll end up with only one or two implemented hacks in your production environment. (If I could only say this more often in my reviews :-).
Keep in mind, this is not the book that'll likely collect the dust on your bookshelf after you'll read it. Mine is always close to the Linux box that I manage (in a good company with already mentioned "Unix Power Tools"). I'm really looking forward to other books from O'Reilly Hacks series, what about 100 hacks on Oracle, MySQL, regular expressions "one liners" (with sed, awk, grep, perl...), Windows NT...
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Summary: Helpful
Review: I found this book quite helpful. Since I am a sysadmin, I need to often attempt various configurations and installtions. For example, just the other day, feeling a bit bored, I flipped open to the "Fun with /proc" section and played around. All in all, fun stuff if you are a Linux enthusiast.
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Summary: PcolaLUG Review
Review: I recieved this book last night at our meeting and got home last night and read it cover to cover.
It was in my opion a very good refrence book to common server issues, From removing unneeded services to
tweaking Linux servers for mass webserving. It had easy to follow language and even provided some nice
Bash scripts to help you out. I have spent most of today trying out some of the commands in my own system.
I would recommend this to both experinced and nonexperinced Linux admins. ~brett~
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Summary: Excellent book
Review: If you have the Hacker attitude and need a methodology to use elegant solutions in a challenging situation and also have important administrative tasks to do, this is the book! Rob Flickenger shares trade secrets in an educational, entertaining way. This practical book is about becoming a Server Hacker in the creative practice of secure system administration.
The author goes through Server Basics and Revision Control. He also discusses the important Backing Up process. Covered subjects are: Networking, Monitoring and Information Servers. Preventing runaway processes, automating logout of idle users, blocking DoS attacks with iptables are also described.
Basic documentation online helps, but there's a lot beyond basics we need to know. This authoritative text comes from someone with hands-on, real-world experience. This kind of know-how is what was captured in this manual. Hacks are sub-tle, many are less obvious, yet all demonstrate the power and flexibility of the GNU/Linux system. The book helps one manage Web installations running Apache, MySQL, and other Open Source tools. Written for users who understand the ba-sics of networking, security and Linux, this valuable book is built upon the expertise of an author who knows what he does. A competent sysadmin appreciates how much a Linux server is a system capable of high performance while routing smoothly large amounts of data through a network connection. Setting up and maintaining a Linux server implies under-standing hardware, the ins and outs of the Linux OS kernel along with its supporting utilities and its layers of applications software. This becomes easier from admins with hands-on, real-world experience like Rob Flickenger. Linux Server Hacks solves practical daily problems for the Linux sysadmin. Every hack is read in minutes and this saves hours of searching for the correct solution. O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term "hacking" for the [good], white hat, geeks. Hackers use and apply ingenuity to solve interesting problems (ESR).
In short, this book is a must. Reading and absorbing it is only part of the equation. Back to your console to practice effi-cient CLI!
User expertise and competence this reading will stimulate: Advanced Unix intelligence. This textbook will optimize pulling a powerful performance out of your Linux box.
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Summary: Great book!
Review: If you want some really good tips into making your port of linux better and more efficient, this is your book!
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Summary: Very useful and clever
Review: Just a couple days after I had started thumbing through this book my boyfriend picked it up and stole it for 2 weeks. The result? "This book rocks."
The book is organized into sections so that it's logical to just read it cover to cover if you felt so inclined. The hacks go from simple to more difficult, and it's certainly not just for Server adminstrators! Most of these hacks are a benefit to any Linux user. I found myself often thinking "Wow, that's so clever!" and "I should have thought of that!" while reading this book. I discovered so many new little ways around doing things, and got a fresh look at how to tackle certain problems, and actually learned quite a bit about programs I use everyday (such as ssh).
It's wonderful that such a collection has been brought together, this is now one of my favorite reference books.
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