- •Contents
- •Preface to second edition
- •1 Introduction
- •1.2 Applying technology in an environment
- •1.3 The human role in systems
- •1.4 Ethical issues
- •1.7 Common practice and good practice
- •1.8 Bugs and emergent phenomena
- •1.10 Knowledge is a jigsaw puzzle
- •1.11 To the student
- •1.12 Some road-maps
- •2 System components
- •2.2 Handling hardware
- •2.3 Operating systems
- •2.4 Filesystems
- •2.5 Processes and job control
- •2.6 Networks
- •2.7 IPv4 networks
- •2.8 Address space in IPv4
- •2.9 IPv6 networks
- •3 Networked communities
- •3.1 Communities and enterprises
- •3.2 Policy blueprints
- •3.4 User behavior: socio-anthropology
- •3.5 Clients, servers and delegation
- •3.6 Host identities and name services
- •3.8 Local network orientation and analysis
- •4 Host management
- •4.1 Global view, local action
- •4.2 Physical considerations of server room
- •4.3 Computer startup and shutdown
- •4.5 Installing a Unix disk
- •4.6 Installation of the operating system
- •4.7 Software installation
- •4.8 Kernel customization
- •5 User management
- •5.1 Issues
- •5.2 User registration
- •5.3 Account policy
- •5.4 Login environment
- •5.5 User support services
- •5.6 Controlling user resources
- •5.7 Online user services
- •5.9 Ethical conduct of administrators and users
- •5.10 Computer usage policy
- •6 Models of network and system administration
- •6.5 Creating infrastructure
- •6.7 Competition, immunity and convergence
- •6.8 Policy and configuration automation
- •7.2 Methods: controlling causes and symptoms
- •7.4 Declarative languages
- •7.6 Common assumptions: clock synchronization
- •7.7 Human–computer job scheduling
- •7.9 Preventative host maintenance
- •7.10 SNMP tools
- •7.11 Cfengine
- •8 Diagnostics, fault and change management
- •8.1 Fault tolerance and propagation
- •8.2 Networks and small worlds
- •8.3 Causality and dependency
- •8.4 Defining the system
- •8.5 Faults
- •8.6 Cause trees
- •8.7 Probabilistic fault trees
- •8.9 Game-theoretical strategy selection
- •8.10 Monitoring
- •8.12 Principles of quality assurance
- •9 Application-level services
- •9.1 Application-level services
- •9.2 Proxies and agents
- •9.3 Installing a new service
- •9.4 Summoning daemons
- •9.5 Setting up the DNS nameservice
- •9.7 E-mail configuration
- •9.8 OpenLDAP directory service
- •9.10 Samba
- •9.11 The printer service
- •9.12 Java web and enterprise services
- •10 Network-level services
- •10.1 The Internet
- •10.2 A recap of networking concepts
- •10.3 Getting traffic to its destination
- •10.4 Alternative network transport technologies
- •10.5 Alternative network connection technologies
- •10.6 IP routing and forwarding
- •10.7 Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)
- •10.8 Quality of Service
- •10.9 Competition or cooperation for service?
- •10.10 Service Level Agreements
- •11 Principles of security
- •11.1 Four independent issues
- •11.2 Physical security
- •11.3 Trust relationships
- •11.7 Preventing and minimizing failure modes
- •12 Security implementation
- •12.2 The recovery plan
- •12.3 Data integrity and protection
- •12.5 Analyzing network security
- •12.6 VPNs: secure shell and FreeS/WAN
- •12.7 Role-based security and capabilities
- •12.8 WWW security
- •12.9 IPSec – secure IP
- •12.10 Ordered access control and policy conflicts
- •12.11 IP filtering for firewalls
- •12.12 Firewalls
- •12.13 Intrusion detection and forensics
- •13 Analytical system administration
- •13.1 Science vs technology
- •13.2 Studying complex systems
- •13.3 The purpose of observation
- •13.5 Evaluating a hierarchical system
- •13.6 Deterministic and stochastic behavior
- •13.7 Observational errors
- •13.8 Strategic analyses
- •13.9 Summary
- •14 Summary and outlook
- •14.3 Pervasive computing
- •B.1 Make
- •B.2 Perl
- •Bibliography
- •Index
1.12. SOME ROAD-MAPS |
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American English is the language of the net. System administrators need it to be able to read documentation, to be able to communicate with others and to ask questions on the Internet. Some sites have even written software tools for training novice administrators. See for instance, ref. [278]. Information can be found from many sources:
•Printed manuals
•Unix manual pages (man and apropos and info commands)
•The World Wide Web
•RFCs (Requests for comment), available on the web
•Newsgroups and discussions
•Papers from the SAGE/Usenix LISA conferences [22]
•More specialized books
A supplement to this book, with a collection of useful recipes and facts, is provided as a resource for system administrators at http://www.iu.hio.no/SystemAdmin. More detailed online course materials relating to the Oslo University Colleges Masters Degree are available at http://www.iu.hio.no/teaching/materials.
1.12 Some road-maps
This book contains many overlapping themes. If you are browsing through the book with a specific aim, the following road-maps might help you to shorten your journey.
1.Resource management: Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
2.Human management: Chapters 3, 5, 8, 11
3.IP networking: Chapters 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12
4.System analysis: Chapters 3, 6, 8, 13
5.Security: Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12
Much of the thinking behind the security policy recommendations in ISO 17799 permeate the book.
Exercises
Self-test objectives
1.What kinds of issues does system administration cover?
2.Is system administration management or engineering?
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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION |
3.Why does the physical environment play a role in system administration?
4.Describe why ethics and human values are important.
5.Is system administration a science? Why/why not?
6.State the top-most principles that guide network and system administrators.
Problems
As a practical, hands-on subject, network and system administration exercises are heavily dependent on what equipment is available to students. Course instructors should therefore use the exercises in this book as templates for customizing their own exercises rather than viewing them as literal instructions.
1.Browse through this whole book from start to finish. Browsing information is a skill you will use a lot as a system administrator. Try to get an overall impression of what the book contains and how it is laid out.
2.List what you think are the important tasks and responsibilities of a system administrator. You will have the opportunity to compare this with your impressions once we reach the end of the book.
3.Locate other books and information sources which will help you. These might take the form of books (such as the recommended reading list at the end of this book) or newsgroups, or web sites.
4.Buy an A–Z notebook for systemizing the facts and knowledge that you pick up along the way.
5.What is an RFC? Locate a list of RFCs on a WWW or FTP server.