automating unix and linux administration
Back when I had my first system administration job, I was helping my boss set up a new server. I noticed he had a directory called "/sysutils". This annoyed me for two reasons: one, I didn't know what it was for and two, it was out of context with the usual unix hierarchy. He explained that this was a directory he used to toss different custom scripts for the server to use. After a while, I got used to it being there and soon started adding my own stuff to it.
Later when I started configuring a server of my own, I caught myself doing something like this:
# mkdir /sysutils Dammit!
I realized two (lots of twos in this article) things then: one, sysutils is a habit that's going to stick for life and two, running any serious server will always include a couple custom scripts and commands.
And in comes our reviewed book. Kirk does a pretty decent job at explaining something that most administrators take as second nature: the automation of running a server or multiple servers. He splits this up in to three main areas: creating custom scripts for repetitive tasks, synchronizing similar information between groups of servers, and monitoring and maintaing multiple servers.
Some of the nice points of this book were the sections on scripting and file sharing. Some of the scripts did not go into a lot of detail about specific actions (such as adding hosts to dhcp, etc). I felt this was done to let the reader make up their own answers to those. In the file sharing section, 5 different filesystems were described. Though some were only a few paragraphs, it was nice to see someone finally acknowledging the pros and cons to both the popular systems and the more unknown systems.
One thing I was disappointed about was the continous coverage of cfengine. If the reader has no interest in learing cfengine, a good 1/3rd of the book can be skipped. While cfengine is a really robost system and I have no complaints about it, it's just something I don't need and caused me to do a lot of page turning.
All and all, it was a decent book and gets an 7/10
