Professional Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

Even though the book is written for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 you can still find in the book something that might help you in your quest for knowledge about Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Overall it is a good book.

I can recommend this book for those, who have just installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (aka RHEL 3) and are wondering what to do next with it; but have no significant Linux/Unix experience to fall back on. For the more seasoned RHEL 3 SysAdmin, you'll probably want to thumb through it before deciding to buy it. This book is notch or two above a starter book on RHEL 3. There are not that many books like this out there, so for this reason alone it may be worth the purchase. I read this book back in January 2005. Writing a review about it was easy. Why? Because the authors repeatedly state throughout their book, what it is they are trying to cover in RHEL 3 and what they are NOT going to cover. They do a very good job of sticking to their objectives. The authors cover many of the services and applications which are commonly configured on RHEL 3. They admit it is not a comprehensive coverage, nor is meant to be. {SysAdmins will have varied opinions on what should and shouldn't be included in this book. SysAdmins having opinions is a given. :) } The authors selections are as good as any. They are also trying to deal with keeping the book down to a readable size, i.e., less than 700 pages. Many of the chapters and topics in this book, are already separate books unto themselves. Each chapter is a survey of one or more solutions/services/applications. The authors forewarn you, these are not all the possible combinations of the same. The authors pick one example and work through an implementation of it. The examples are a good mix of Command Line (CLI) and Graphic User Interface (GUI). Most of the time further references, usually URLs are included in each chapter. I personally liked chapters 4 - 6 on Storage Management, HA (Clustering) and Red Hat's WAF (Web Application Framework). Storage Mgmt and HA/Clustering are of particular interest to me and the Red Hat WAF stuff was new for me. The authors covered NFS and automounting (autofs), but omitted NIS. {Remember SysAdmins' have opinions.} Manually doing NFS mounts is fine, if you have just a few systems. Once you get over a couple of dozen systems requiring NFS mounts, then automounting is the next logical step. Its also equally common to do automounting in conjunction with NIS. Yes, I know NIS is going to be replaced by LDAP and NIS+ is dead. But using NIS and NFS automounting together is still quite common and will continue to be for some time. (Security-wise; NIS & NFS are only done inside the firewall.) The authors also covered file sharing via Samba. But LDAP just got a skimpy couple of pages. Authors' choice, I guess? My other curious observations was their coverage of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python, Perl, PHP...). They covered LAMP pieces in the book and in the last chapter without actually using the word "LAMP". One of the authors is involved with LAMP through his company. So why not use the word? To quote John Madden, "What was that all about?". I

A book written in this fashion has been needed for a long time. I found it to be a very easy read and filled with the day to day task that new and seasoned Red Hat administrators come in to contact with every day. I have spent many hours reading other Red Hat books but never found one particular book to encompass all that I needed. This book does that and more. The newbies will find it easy to understand, as the veterans will find it a usefull resource for those times when an answer is needed right away. If you are new or a veteran to RH EL 3 GET THIS BOOK, it will save tons of time, and provide the answers you are looking for. Wrox has picked a winnner w/ Mohammed J. Kabir, I have been a fan of his writing style for a long time, although some may disagree, he writes in a very clear concise manner, which will help the newbs out there to grasp a concept and method. Bernie Johnson Sr. Linux Admin

Linux used to be so simple. You went to your favorite book or computeer store and sitting on the shelf was a shrink wrapped red box that contained all you needed. You followed the directions and in a short time you had Linux running on your system. Of course back then we didn't worry much about security. HA (High Availability) was an acronym that hadn't been invented yet. MySQL was a ... Well never mind! The world simply isn't like that any more. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the stable, supported heavy duty version of Linux intended for stable, mission critical applications. This book clearly describes what you get with RHEL and how to utilize these components to build an enterprise level server. It presumes that you have some knowledge of Linux and probably you should have some working experience with some kind of Linux distribution. Given that, if you are a systems administrator and want to learn about RHEL, or you're now assigned a security responsibility, high availability, server farms or the like, this is for you.