UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [11]
The image of the BSD daemon is © 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick and is used with permission. More information about the daemon can be obtained from http://www.mckusick.com/beastie.
The actual name of the operating system we refer to as “Solaris” is “the Solaris Operating Environment.” Sorry about that, Sun.
All trademarks and service marks mentioned in this book are the property of their respective owners.
Acknowledgments
Hundreds of readers have sent us bug fixes, comments, and criticisms on the first and second editions of this book. We would like to thank everyone who took the time to write us, and we hope that we’ve successfully incorporated the feedback we received.
System administration for UNIX has become more complex over the last eleven years, and the breadth of this text has grown proportionately. Many folks have helped with this edition in one way or another, assisting with everything from technical reviews to overall moral support. These people deserve special thanks for hanging in there with us and helping us get this edition out the door:
Eric Allman Steve Gaede Hal Miller
Pete Barber Andrew Gollan Jeff Moe
Dave Barr Bob Gray Herb Morreale
Dave Clements Andreas Gustafsson Laszlo Nemeth
David Conrad Geoff Halprin Tobi Oetiker
Drew Eckhardt Daniel Karrenberg Ray Plzak
Randy Else Paul Kooros Andy Rudoff
Bill Fenner Cricket Liu Greg Shapiro
Peggy Fenner Bill Manning Daniel Sully
Jeff Forys Lynda McGinley Paul Vixie
We give special thanks to Barb Dijker for all the extra effort she put into reviewing this edition, and to Pat Parseghian for her extra efforts on the second edition and her continued moral support on this edition.
Mary Franz, the editor of this edition, is deserving not only of special thanks but also an award for successfully dealing with temperamental authors. Mary was infinitely patient with us, even when we didn’t deserve it, and she did everything possible to encourage our continued focus on quality in this edition.
Thanks also to the editor of the first edition, John Wait.
Many thanks go to Tyler Curtain, our copy editor for the first and second editions. Tyler also remained onboard as our staff cartoonist.
Mary Lou Nohr did an outstanding job as copy editor of this edition; we greatly appreciate her efforts and flexibility.
Danny Savard at Hewlett-Packard and Andy Rudoff at Sun Microsystems deserve a round of thanks for coercing their respective organizations into providing us with reference hardware.
Finally, the computer science department at the University of Colorado deserves many thanks for providing computing resources and numerous “test subjects.”
SECTION ONE:
BASIC ADMINISTRATION
1 Where to Start
We set out to write a book that could be a system administrator’s trusty companion, providing the practical advice, comfort, and basic system administration theory that you can’t get from reading manual pages. As a result, this book is designed to complement—not replace—your system’s documentation.
We think this book will help you in five ways:
• It will give you an overview of the major administrative systems, identifying the different pieces of each and explaining how they work together.
• It will introduce general administrative techniques that we have found, through experience, to be worthwhile.
• It will help you choose solutions that continue to work well as your site grows in size and complexity.
• It will help you sort good ideas from bad and educate you about various atrocities of taste committed by operating system developers.
• It will summarize common procedures so that you don’t have to dig through the excessive detail of the manuals to accomplish simple tasks.
It’s impossible to perform these functions with perfect objectivity, but we think we’ve made our biases fairly clear throughout the text. One of the interesting things about system administration is the fact that reasonable people can have dramatically different