Professional Red HatEnterprise Linux3 (Wrox Professional Guides)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 744 pages
• Published by: Wrox September 3, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0764572830
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0764572838
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 2.3 pounds

Reader Reviews
I can recommend this book for those, who have just installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (aka RHEL 3) and are wondering what to do next with it; but have no significant Linux/Unix experience to fall back on. For the more seasoned RHEL 3 SysAdmin, you'll probably want to thumb through it before deciding to buy it. This book is notch or two above a starter book on RHEL 3. There are not that many books like this out there, so for this reason alone it may be worth the purchase. I read this book back in January 2005. Writing a review about it was easy. Why? Because the authors repeatedly state throughout their book, what it is they are trying to cover in RHEL 3 and what they are NOT going to cover. They do a very good job of sticking to their objectives. The authors cover many of the services and applications which are commonly configured on RHEL 3. They admit it is not a comprehensive coverage, nor is meant to be. {SysAdmins will have varied opinions on what should and shouldn't be included in this book. SysAdmins having opinions is a given. :) } The authors selections are as good as any. They are also trying to deal with keeping the book down to a readable size, i.e., less than 700 pages. Many of the chapters and topics in this book, are already separate books unto themselves. Each chapter is a survey of one or more solutions/services/applications. The authors forewarn you, these are not all the possible combinations of the same. The authors pick one example and work through an implementation of it. The examples are a good mix of Command Line (CLI) and Graphic User Interface (GUI). Most of the time further references, usually URLs are included in each chapter. I personally liked chapters 4 - 6 on Storage Management, HA (Clustering) and Red Hat's WAF (Web Application Framework). Storage Mgmt and HA/Clustering are of particular interest to me and the Red Hat WAF stuff was new for me. The authors covered NFS and automounting (autofs), but omitted NIS. {Remember SysAdmins' have opinions.} Manually doing NFS mounts is fine, if you have just a few systems. Once you get over a couple of dozen systems requiring NFS mounts, then automounting is the next logical step. Its also equally common to do automounting in conjunction with NIS. Yes, I know NIS is going to be replaced by LDAP and NIS+ is dead. But using NIS and NFS automounting together is still quite common and will continue to be for some time. (Security-wise; NIS & NFS are only done inside the firewall.) The authors also covered file sharing via Samba. But LDAP just got a skimpy couple of pages. Authors' choice, I guess? My other curious observations was their coverage of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python, Perl, PHP...). They covered LAMP pieces in the book and in the last chapter without actually using the word "LAMP". One of the authors is involved with LAMP through his company. So why not use the word? To quote John Madden, "What was that all about?". I just thought it a strange omission, considering... Red Hat has just recently released RHEL 4. So how long will this book on RHEL 3 be relevant? Probably at least through this year (2005) and longer and/or until someone writes the RHEL 4 version. Note, there are still folks out there running RHEL 2.1. My background is, I've been in IT for over twenty yrs as a IT Mgr, SysAdm, System Architect and System Engineer. I worked with various flavors of Unix since 1985 and with Red Hat since version 3.0.3 back in 1996. My current Linux flavor of choice is Fedora Core 2 (soon to be 3). Comment | | (Report this)