UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [8]
As this book shows, system administrators have often been ill-served by the traditional development model. Vendors do what they want (often for reasons that are less than clear), and admins adapt. They have to, since the software is designed as one large, integrated system. Touch one component, and several others break.
As we gain experience with the process of assembling complete systems from many separate components, this situation will improve. There’s really no reason why an administrator shouldn’t choose, say, an authentication system in the same way that a secretary chooses a word processor. Experience shows that the opportunity for comparison and choice is all that’s needed for good software to triumph over bad.
Looking through this new edition of the Handbook, it’s clear that we still have a way to go towards making UNIX administration graceful, easy, and pure. If the last decade is any indication, however, we will see rapid progress in the years ahead. In the meantime, enjoy this book. To infinity and beyond!
Linus Torvalds
June, 2000
Foreword to the Second Edition
There are a lot of books about system administration out there. Why is this one special? We can think of two reasons.
First, it’s good. The authors do real system administration on real systems with a lot of users, a lot of networking, and a lot of special connectivity. They’ve been at it long enough that they can still recall what a Unibus adaptor was and what was wrong with the DZ11 (no interrupts). They’ve lived in a “dirty” world with lots of different systems from lots of different vendors and lots of different versions of the operating system. They’ve been bitten by alligators of every type and persuasion. This is not a nice, neat book written for a nice, clean world. It’s a nasty book written for a nasty world.
Second, it’s comprehensive. There are a lot of good books about specific UNIX® topics (we know of a great book on sendmail, for example), but few books on the general problem of system administration that are worth their weight in dead trees.1
The initial draft of the first edition of this book was called UNIX System Administration Made Difficult, which seemed appropriate: the “... Made Simple” style of books always seemed to gloss over so many details that they actually made the job harder.
The fact is that system administration is difficult. UNIX systems are tremendously powerful, and with power comes some measure of complexity. PCs get complicated, too, when you start connecting them to networks, modems, printers, and third-party disks, and when you realize that you need to worry about topics such as backups and security. Suddenly, managing a PC starts to look a lot like administering a UNIX box: “It’s easy! Just click here, then you have to turn off the printer to use the network (select here, pull down this menu, and click on “Disable” and “Apply”), then pull down this menu, then select the selector, type in your hostname here, then click here, here, and double-click here (dismiss that dialog box, it always gives that, I don’t know why...), then pop up here, select that menu, enable the network, then go over there to start up the TCP/IP application, then—Whoops! We forgot to set the network mask; no problem, just go back to the third menu selection and change the mask—Drat, that disabled the network, just fix that (click, drag, click)... Great, now start up the TCP/IP application again (click), and now you can use telnet! See, easy!”
By contrast, UNIX boxes have the network installed by default. It is set up once, and most users never see how the configuration is done. Unfortunately, system administrators are not “most users” and so we get to go through the messy process of setting it up.
The authors also