Re: unix server administration

In article <32e88a5f.592348321_at_atlas>, steve_at_aethos.co.uk says...

>On Wed, 22 Jan 1997 19:49:23 -0500, cys4_at_columbia.edu wrote:
>>Can anybody advise me which is the best book out there that teaches
>>unix administration, may be in sun?
>>I am trying to teach myself by working with a book.

{snip}

>Until you've cocked up big time, you won't be thinking in the right
>way to become a good administrator. It's going to happen, we've all
>done it, so don't worry too much about it. Just hope you did a backup
>the nught before!

Yes, too right, the same applies to database administration as well. The first and most important task to familiarise yourself with is backup and recovery (and that is before you've let any users loose on your system;). Bust that system and put it back together again.

>Flame suit on!

Well, it isn't a very controversial view.

However, I found 'Unix for Superusers' (Eric Foxley) very helpful when I was getting going, as was 'Advanced Unix Programming' by Marc J. Rochkind. They are both going to be a bit old now, and the latter is only really of use if you are mucking about in C & Unix internals - though it is the best book IMHO on Unix systems programming I've ever read & has a lot of interesting stuff about Unix internals generally.

For more general admin, the former book gives some good pointers. I found that Sun documentation is fairly useless for a lot of common tasks, as it assumes you are doing everything (well most stuff) via X, and is full of errors. HP and Sequent documentation is much better, though like all documentation has errors and ommissions, but Sun are the worst offenders in this respect that I've come across.

I'm afraid I'm one of those dinosours that still edit the password file directly and think vi is a great editor compared to ed however, so someone else may be able to suggest some more up to date stuff.

Cheers.
Martin.

-- 
Martin Rapier, Database Administrator
Corporate Information & Computing Services.
University of Sheffield
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To Infinity and Beyond.