Overview
Wouldnt you like to automate the tedious daily tasks of system administration? Automating UNIX and Linux Administration will show you how, by exploring existing tools and offering real-world examples. Although some of the book is Linux-specific, most of the information applies to any UNIX system, including material on automating tasks across multiple variants of UNIX. Author Kirk Bauer briefly overviews tools and technologiesand assumes preliminary knowledge about editing a configuration file or mounting a file system.
The techniques, methods, and tools in this book will help you manage a single systembut will prove especially powerful across multiple systems. No matter if the systems are desktops, servers, or Beowulf clustersall of them will benefit from this automation. And managing five to five thousand systems will become a simpler task!
Synopsis
Wouldn't you like to automate the tedious daily tasks of system administration? Automating UNIX and Linux Administration will show you how, by exploring existing tools and offering real-world examples. Parts of the book are Linux-specific, but most of it applies to a UNIX system, including multiple variants of UNIX. Author Kirk Bauer briefly overviews tools and technologies-and assumes preliminary knowledge about editing a configuration file or mounting a file system.
The techniques, methods, and tools in this book will help you manage a single system-but will prove especially powerful across multiple systems. No matter if the systems are desktops, servers, or Beowulf clusters-all of them will benefit from this automation. And managing five to five thousand systems will become a simpler task!
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewAh, the life of the typical sysadmin. There’s the occasional opportunity to do something really innovative -- the moments that make the job worthwhile. At the other end of the scale, there’s user support. Let’s say that’s not always the most rewarding part of the day.
Then, there’s the dominant part of the job: a seemingly endless number of routine, boring, repetitive tasks. Setting up accounts. Monitoring logs. Running backups. Applying patches. Many sysadmins spend so much time on this stuff, there’s no time for anything else. (And as organizations grow, it’s simply no longer practical to hire more administrators to babysit more and more systems.)
Humans hate to be bored. Computers could care less: They’re superb at routine, boring, repetitive tasks. Why not take advantage of this and automate as many of those tasks as you can? That’s the subject of Automating UNIX and Linux Administration, by Kirk Bauer.
Bauer systematically walks through virtually every category of system administration task that lends itself to automation. You’ll start by mastering the Secure Shell protocol, which has revolutionized system administration by enabling secure, encrypted communication between untrusted hosts over an insecure network -- so you can remotely manage systems wherever they are.
Next, Bauer turns to customizing your command prompt, so it’s easier to work with the shell without making mistakes or getting confused. Once that’s squared away, you’ll walk through creating login and shell scripts. You’ll learn how to copy local files recursively to the same directory on multiple machines; how to distribute login scripts; and how to make changes to login scripts for a subset of your machines, using detection code to determine which systems it should be deployed on; and more.
Bauer then turns to automating tasks that typically need to be performed before a system is added to your network. For example: classifying your new computer, allocating an IP address, adding the new host to system lists, configuring DHCP and DNS, and updating your /etc/hosts file.
Here, as elsewhere, Bauer’s scripts are modular. You can expand or trim them as necessary -- and you can use the concepts you learn to perform similar tasks. For instance, once you’ve learned how to add a system, Bauer shows how to remove one, too.
Once you’ve done all the prep work, Bauer shows how to automate and customize system installation and configuration. You’ll find chapters on streamlining data sharing among systems; and automatically running packages and applying patches. There are extensive sample scripts for system maintenance, monitoring, and security -- as well as a full chapter on automated backup and restoration.
Bauer’s examples use a wide range of automation tools, including the bash shell, Perl, regular expressions, grep, sed, and awk. Of course, after you’ve downloaded the samples, you’ll need to tweak them for your own environment. But if you’re a moderately experienced UNIX/Linux sysadmin, few of them should give you trouble. Simply put, the time you spend with this book could pay off...100 times over. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.