UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [486]
There was at one time a list called hpux-admin, but it seems to have died some time in 1998. A replacement (sort of) is available from www.egroups.com.
Consult www.redhat.com/mailing-lists for Linux-related mailing lists; you can subscribe via the web. The lists are called linux-xxx, but none of the possible values of xxx are directly targeted to sysadmins.
Check www.freebsd.org/handbook/eresources.html for resources related to FreeBSD. You can subscribe to any of the lists by mailing majordomo@freebsd.org and saying “subscribe xxx”. Unfortunately, none of the lists seem directly targeted to sysadmin issues, but the freebsd-questions, freebsd-stable, and freebsd-security lists often have sysadmin content.
Sysadmins have plenty of web resources to choose from. The SAGE web pages have a list of helpful links. Table 27.5 shows a few of our favorites:
Table 27.5. Useful web resources for system administrators
Printed resources
The best resources for UNIX administrators in the printed realm are the O’Reilly series of books. The series began with UNIX in a Nutshell over 20 years ago and now includes a separate volume on just about every important UNIX subsystem and command. It also includes books on the Internet, Windows NT, and other non-UNIX topics. All are typically reasonably priced, timely, and focused. Tim O’Reilly has become quite interested in the open source movement and runs a yearly conference on this topic as well as conferences on Perl, Java, and TCL/Tk. See www.oreilly.com for more information.
27.15 STANDARDS
The standardization process helps us in some cases (modems from different manufacturers can talk to each other) and hurts us in others (OSI protocols, millions of dollars down the drain). Standards committees should codify and formalize existing practice, not invent.
Standards are intended to level the playing field and make it possible for customers to buy compatible products from competing vendors. Some of the parties involved in the standardization process really do just want to codify existing practice. Others have a more political purpose: to delay a competitor or to reduce the amount of work required to bring their own company’s products into conformance.
Government organizations are often the biggest procurers of standards-based systems and applications. The use of standards allows them to buy competitively without favoring a particular brand. However, some cynics have called standards a nonmonetary trade barrier—companies slow down the standards process until their products catch up.
There are several standards bodies, both formal and informal. Each has different rules for membership, voting, and clout. From a system or network administrator’s perspective, the most important bodies are POSIX (Portable Operating System Interfaces, pronounced pahz-icks) and the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force, described on page 263). Summaries of emerging standards are posted to the newsgroups comp.std.unix and comp.org.usenix and published in the USENIX publication ;login:.
POSIX, an offshoot of the IEEE, has engaged itself for the last several years in defining a general standard for UNIX. Has this had any effect on commercially available versions of UNIX? Yes! The Open Group, which licenses the UNIX trademark, bases its UNIX specification on POSIX. Every system that calls itself UNIX supports the POSIX interfaces. Some could argue that everything is more complicated now that vendors support both POSIX and their own original interfaces, but that assertion is largely untrue. Few domains have both a POSIX interface and an alternative proprietary interface. Unfortunately, POSIX does not have much to say about what goes on at the layers of the OS where sysadmins live and play.
Three areas of system administration have been considered for standardization by POSIX: software installation, user administration, and print management. Print management got hopelessly embroiled in politics and was withdrawn; they started with MIT’s Palladium