• Title: Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition
• Author(s) Olaf Kirch, Terry Dawson
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (June, 2000)
• Hardcover/Paperback: 506 pages
• eBook: HTML
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565924002
• ASIN: B00007FYJC
• ISBN-13: N/A
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Book Description

The long-overdue second edition of O'Reilly's Linux Network Administrator's Guide, by Olaf Kirch and Terry Dawson, still sports the cowboy colophon, suggesting that netadmins have retained their Lone Ranger personas. While life for a sysadmin has improved over the years with the introduction of the ./Configure utility and build-less rpm distributions, network building and maintenance is still a vast prairie, in its complexity growing faster than the availability of tools and documentation to tame it.

Linux document libraries are filled with disparate, obsolete, and/or redundant How-Tos for multiple Ethernet cards, bridging, cable modems, DHCP, Samba, ISDN, DSL, and laptop Ethernet card peculiarities.

Sadly, the recycling of the cowboy motif indicates a deeper problem with the second edition. While authors Kirch and Dawson have expanded and updated Kirch's original text, they give scant attention to any of the paradigm shifts that have occurred in Linux networking since 1993.

Strangely, the authors have retained much material on core technologies of diminishing importance in the era of small ISP-connected networks. While PPP and Chat are still relevant for ISP connections, such protocols as UUCP, SLIP, dip, and PLIP are largely of historical interest.

Discussions of packet routing are not browsable, and there is no practical presentation of the configuration of routing for multiple Ethernet cards, which the small-network Linux market needs. The showstopper is the absence of any discussion of configuring DHCP, DSL, cable modems, or Samba. When the authors blithely indicate in their preface the growing importance of these areas, one gathers that this book was written in 1997 or earlier.

• Olaf Kirch has a degree in Mathematics from Technische Universitaet Darmstadt. He presently works as a UNIX programmer for a company producing a CAD system. A Linux fan for a couple of years now, he is amazed at the pace its development continues to progress. For relaxation, Olaf likes painting, drawing, and reading (anything from nineteenth century poetry to detective novels and Japanese manga). He likes to spend time outdoors whenever possible. He doesn't have a driver's license (never had one), so he goes about most of his daily routine by bicycle. When he gets away from his keyboard for more than a few days, he likes to go mountain-walking.

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• Unix/Linux System Administration
• Unix/Linux Networking
• Networks Security, Administration and Management
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