[TriLUG] essential Linux skills?

[Aaron Joyner]

Matt Frye wrote:

>After reading Aaron's email, and then "The Art of Unix Programming," I
>would recommend that sysadmins be given a copy of "The Practice of
>System and Network Administration," by Tom Limoncelli.  This book
>makes ordinary geeks into organizational powerhouses by giving them
>the power to see *why* they are doing things, and has several good
>sections on how to deal with real world problems.
>
>Oh, and then read all my articles.  :-P
>
>MPF
>  
>
All of Matt's modesty aside, I'd certainly agree with his recommendation 
whole-heartedly.  I've tried very hard to get a few of my SA friends 
(you know who you are) to read this book, and although it's size is 
intimidating, I think it's worth it's weight in gold.  In the context of 
this thread, I didn't think it appropriate for a Linux Essentials 
course, as it's really platform-agnostic, it tries to give you the over 
arching ideas of System Administration, that really are independent of 
what particular platform you might be running, like "Do Backups, do them 
well", "It's not a service unless you're monitoring it", "Your backups 
are useless if you aren't 100% confident you can restore them", 
"Understanding name spaces, and how to organize them", "Configuration 
Management via revision control", etc.

While I've mentioned backups, another great book for *NIX sysadmins is 
UNIX Backup and Recovery.  It's a classic, with good reason.  One of the 
prime tenants of the book is that no one cares about backups, they're 
unglamorous and usually considered unimportant.  What's really 
important, are the *restores*.  :)  And of course, it shows you 
everything you have to do to prepare for those restores.

Aaron S. Joyner