Thanks

Story: LXer Book Review: Pro Linux System AdministrationTotal Replies: 2
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hkwint

Oct 22, 2009
7:33 PM EDT
Thanks for reading 1080 pages for us Sander. I might consider buying the book. Maybe you could add the cost of the book to the review?

Also, it's funny you mention blacklisting, RAID and LVM: I didn't do that but never encountered any errors. Maybe just lucky?
Steven_Rosenber

Oct 22, 2009
10:26 PM EDT
Sander, I tried to read between the lines on the review. I know what you think of this book, but are there any other sysadmin books you recommend more? I'm in the market for some.
Sander_Marechal

Oct 23, 2009
2:27 AM EDT
@Hans: Thanks for the suggestion. I added the price at the bottom to the book information table. As for RAID/LVM device blacklisting: It's mostly a precaution. Bad things can happen if your RAID fails for some reason and you have LVM configured to automatically assemble the volume groups. It can try to assemble it from the raw devices instead.

If you have saved your LVM configuration to /etc then there is no problem because LVM will only search the devices you specify. In that case the RAID device will be missing and LVM won't start. Which is less bad than LVM eating up your RAID by writing to the raw disks.

@Steven: It depends on what you want to know. For a general all-round sysadmin book I can recommend this one, but if you're only interested in specific topics then there are probably better books out there which covers just the topic you want in more depth. The parts where this book lacks some information is high up the application stack, such as KnowledgeTree or Zimbra itself. The direct user-facing applications. Anything below there (from the system itself to backups, configuration management, provisioning, networking, mail/web services, etcetera) is well covered.

I've used the book myself already to set up Postfix/Dovecot/SpamAssassin/Fetchmail on my home server so I can IMAP my e-mail from all my computers. The only parts not covered by the book were the ManageSieve server for server-side filtering and importing my local Thunderbird MBOX files into Dovecot.

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