Review: Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition

Your editor is often asked if he would be willing to be a technical reviewer for an upcoming Linux-oriented book. Such requests are almost always turned down. Technical review is an important task, but it takes vast amounts of time and the compensation is mostly measured in karma points. It is a hard task to squeeze in. Evi Nemeth, however, earned special consideration many years ago when she allowed LWN's co-founders to do their Data Structures homework on the University of Colorado's lone VAX 11/780 - on the condition that they learn C. She also let your editor make some "fixes" (long since lost, mercifully) to the memory management system on the early BSD release running on that VAX. So, when Evi and company asked for help reviewing the second edition of the Linux Administration Handbook, your editor agreed to do it.

This was not a trivial task; the Handbook now weighs in at a full 1000 pages. It is derived from the classic Unix Administration Handbook, which was the definitive administration manual for its times. The second iteration is an attempt to bring the book up to date with the current Linux state of the art, an attempt which is not 100% successful. The fact remains, however, that the Linux Administration Handbook remains unmatched for its combination of clear writing, technical depth, and extensive experience in all aspects of system and network management.

A glance through the table of contents shows that some audiences will get more out of the Handbook than others. The chapters on DNS and electronic mail administration are over 100 pages - each. Networking is covered in detail, from how to wire up an RJ-45 connector through Samba administration. Backups, printing, process management, the bootstrap process, and so on are all addressed. There is also a lot of accumulated wisdom on dealing with users, working with vendors, managing system administration groups, tracking problems, etc. If you are charged with managing mostly server-oriented systems, this book has almost everything you need.

The second edition updates the Handbook in a number of ways. Ubuntu "Dapper" and Fedora Core 5 have been added to the list of covered distributions; they join RHEL 4.3, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.2, and Debian Testing (to be Etch) as of last September. Bacula is now covered in detail (and much of the Amanda discussion has been taken out). The electronic mail chapter - while still centered mostly on sendmail - now has a reasonable section on postfix. The security chapter has been filled out with the latest tools. And so on.

As your editor can well attest, however, bringing a book up to the current state of Linux is a hard task - and it never stays current for long. Still, at times, the Linux Administration Handbook shows its age a little too much. Back in the days of VAXen and early Unix workstations, we all got very good at dealing with serial ports and making terminals talk. But how many of us need a chapter on that subject now? The security chapter passes over SELinux entirely - a major shortcoming. As far as the authors are concerned, udev seems not to exist - it is only mentioned in passing. But how does one manage a contemporary system without an understanding of udev? There's plenty of information on how deeply Ethernet hubs can be cascaded, but wireless networking is passed over almost entirely.

There is also almost no discussion of contemporary desktops. The Handbook authors avoid graphical administration tools in favor of really understanding (and being able to script) the system at a lower level, and this is good. But an administrator in this century should have a sense for how the desktop goes together and how to configure things to give users the experience and capabilities they need. The second edition does add a badly-needed chapter on the X Window System, but it leaves the upper parts of the desktop untouched.

So the second edition of the Linux Administration Handbook is not perfect. But, for a large part of the system administration space, this book has the best combination of "how to do it" (technical details) and "how you should do it" (what works well in the real world). It is still the first place your editor looks when the man page falls short. If your job requires keeping Linux systems running, especially if it's in a larger environment, you probably need this book on your shelf.

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