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Comment on Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting by J. Fahey

J. Fahey — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:57:43 +0000

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

More specialized than Volume 1, July 8, 2007

J. Fahey (France) -

This review is from: Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting (Paperback)

This is a very good book. These remarks are for Linux users on the way up. If you are already an über-üser, well, you will probably like this book anyway.

If you don't have the first volume, you might want to start with it. It has some simple but very useful things that apply to just about anyone with their own Linux box and a command line.

This volume is much more advanced, and most of the tricks and techniques deal with much more specialized problem domains, ie. things you might not have run into yet. One advantage of this book over the first is that it is very up to date in its recommendations of existing software to use.

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Comment on Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting by Rob Wehrli

Rob Wehrli — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:32:28 +0000

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

This book totally rocks!, November 18, 2006

Rob Wehrli (Melbourne) -

This review is from: Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting (Paperback)

I can't say enough about the work done in Linux Server Hacks vII by the two Bs. Bill and Brian have hit the ball out of the ballpark with this one.

Just the section on LVM (Logical Volume Management) have saved my bacon!

Every single "hack" (read tip) is extremely practical, applicable and relevant to managing and administering Linux systems whether "servers" or not!

The absolute best part of this book is that you get really useful, insightful views into the experiences of seasoned veterans of Unix systems. If you sit in a NOC or if you're the 24x7 guy/gal on a server farm, this book is an occupational requirement! Everyone else will appreciate it if they're running Linux. In my modest network of perhaps 30 Linux systems, I can tell you that I saved hours of effort with just two of the hacks included in this volume. Considering the time savings, buying this book saved my company more than 300% on the cover price.

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Comment on Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting by John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer"

John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:06:06 +0000

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!, September 12, 2006

John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" (Pomeroy, Ohio) -

This review is from: Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting (Paperback)

Are you a system administrator? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Bill Von Hagen and Brian K Jones, have done an outstanding job of writing volume two of a book that focuses on cool hacks they developed or used in their server and system administration careers.

Von Hagen and Jones, begin by exploring the authentication options that are available to you in heterogeneous networked computing environments and simplify administering user accounts and passwords. Then, the authors explore ways of connecting to remote systems. Next, the authors explain how to set up central servers that do things like synchronize the time on all the systems in your environment, deliver IP addresses to newly connected hosts, and integrate these services with existing ones. The authors then present a variety of cool sysadmin tips and techniques that they've accumulated over the years, including how to keep processes running without writing a daemon or staying logged in, how to use PXE to netboot Linux, how to share information with fellow sysadmins in a centralized fashion, how to get the most out of classic but incredibly useful terminal-oriented applications, and so on. They continue to explore some cool ways of making it easier for you to manage storage, deploy new systems, do backups of today's huge disks, and even reduce the need for some of the restore requests that occasionally clog every sysadmin's inbox. Then, the authors provide some tips and tricks for managing distributed storage and making sure the administrative environments on your servers are synchronized. They then discuss a wide range of security tools and techniques that can help you sleep at night and protect your systems at the same time. Next, they provide techniques for optimizing system performance, whether by figuring out who's hogging the entire CPU and shooting down that user's network sessions or by using cool knobs in the /proc filesystem to tweak system performance or using journaling filesystems to minimize system restart time. Then, they include hacks that enable you to centralize log information in a variety of ways, be warned when problems arise, and get the most out of system status information, whether it's log information, internal disk controller status data, or remote hardware status information that you can collect via SNMP. Finally, the authors show you how to boot crippled systems so that you can diagnose problems, repair munged filesystems, and even recover deleted files of data that was stored on disks that have gone belly up.

This most excellent book has presented hacks that are techniques that the authors have used at various times. More importantly, they view these techniques as time- and hassle-savers that are usually downright fun and cool.

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Comment on LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell by Charlie Penrose

Charlie Penrose — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 03:31:49 +0000

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

Success on LPI Exam One, Haven't Taken Two Yet, August 16, 2001

Charlie Penrose (Western US) -

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell (Paperback)

I'm happy with this book. I'd been running Linux in an academic environment for several years, so I had a bit of a head start before reading this book. I took the first LPI Level 1 exam this afternoon, and passed with about 45 minutes to spare. As a professional AIX and Linux consultant, I was surprised to have acquired new knowledge from reading this book. However, I did encounter a few questions on the exam that weren't covered in the book, as well as a few tricky (or maybe just ambiguously/poorly written) questions that required multiple rereads. Despite being the first of the lowest level of LPI certification, this exam became surprisingly difficult during the last third of the questions (I don't think this is an adaptive test). I've taken Microsoft, IBM, and Sun certification exams, and this test ranks among the tougher ones. That's good, in my opinion, because it sorts out the knowledgeable people from, ahem, the others. I strongly advise you to read O'Reilly's Running Linux in addition to this book before attempting the exam. I hope O'Reilly plans a similar book for LPI Levels 2 and 3.

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Comment on LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell by Eric J. Wu

Eric J. Wu — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 03:13:20 +0000

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

It's a great book BUT, August 8, 2001

Eric J. Wu (cambridge, ma USA) -

This review is from: LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell (Paperback)

This is an excellent book, very comprehensive. Organized by subject matter. The explanations are very clear and easy to understand. The writing style is easy to follow and direct without being too cutsey or annoying. I will say there are a number of shortcomings that will hopefully be fixed in edition 2. 1. Not enough practice problems (there is just 1 practice exam for each one exam) 2. Sometimes they screw up the topics. For instance, there is a whole mess of stuff on shell scripting in the "LPI101" section; yet the LPI website says that shell scripting is in part 2. 3. There are a few typos.

I will say that after having taken LPI 101, but not 102, and passed, that there are some holes in the book. For instance, (and this is not a real example) the book may tell you about "ls" and "ls -l" and "ls -a" but the test may ask about "ls -c" or "ls --sort=size" or something. So there are some holes in the book! You have to be careful. But OVERALL it's a good book, if you learn everything in the book you will pass. Just don't expect that it will give you the keys to the test.

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Comment on LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell by Robert Nagle "idiotprogrammer"

Robert Nagle "idiotprogrammer" — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:58:13 +0000

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

great study guide--I passed!, July 25, 2002

Robert Nagle "idiotprogrammer" (Houston, TX United States) -

This review is from: LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell (Paperback)

The first thing I want to say about reading this book is : I passed! Certification books serve four purposes: first, they serve as a way to prepare for computerized certification exams. Second, they provide a training plan for learning the objectives in the certification. Third, can a book explain system administration concepts while limiting a readers exposure to difficult, elusive topics until later? Fourth, can a book like this still be useful post-certification?

Part One (covering the 101 test) contained generous amounts of examples for text-processing commands and a really top notch discussion of permissions, ownership, booting and documentation. Helpfully, need to know boxes are scattered throughout the book to indicate how important a topic is on the test. Frequently, the author will point out that although he explained a certain topic in depth, it wont be covered in depth on the test. I really appreciated that, although I found that the actual test covered certain topics (such as X Windows) in much more depth than Dean leads us to believe. One thing, by the way, to remember, is that often the book gives only the 5 or 6 most popular switches for each command. If you learned about these commands only from this book, you might be overlooking some important switches. I found this especially to be true when Dean discussed user management. I consider usermod g and usermod G to be really important commands, but this book didnt even mention them. On the other hand, Dean gave an explanation of regular expressions which was quite adequate for the purposes of this book. Although omitting some switches proved exasperating at times, the simplified view of the commands can be helpful for linux newbies.

Part Two (covering 102 test) covered a lot more ground: Apache, sendmail, nfs, dns, tcp-ip; heck, books have been written on each of those topics. The book covered well these topics in particular: compiling a kernel, troubleshooting tcp-ip and using rpms. I found his discussion of Debian package management to be hard to follow, although that may be because Ive never used it before in real life (but watch out! The test covers this in depth!). The books discussion of network services (nfs, sendmail, apache, samba) was shallow at best, but I doubt anyone would rely on such a book for maintaining a web server, for example. But it provided some of the basics at least. The section on X Window was succinct and helpful. Also, some of the information presented is outdated, at least on Red Hats latest distribution. Red Hat, for example, no longer uses inetd for startup, and some of the directory paths have since changed. These are minor quibbles, and one of the challenge of passing a certification like this is asking yourself: should I be learning things for the exam that are no longer accurate or relevant in current distributions? Certifications test the knowledge available at the time of test creation, when in reality new applications are being added and processes streamlined every day.

The book contains lots of sample multiple choice items, review questions and exercises. The multiple choice items didnt really add much to the book, but I frequently referred to the review questions. (Remember, the LPI exam has fill-in-the-blanks questions). Dont overlook the excellent highlighters index at the back of the book.

Two minor quibbles. First, the cover is not very strong and is bent, torn and curled over. The other is that the LPI exam objectives are not located at the front or back of the book. Rather, the table of objectives for 101 are in the front, and objectives for 102 are in the middle. I referred to this table constantly to see the amount of weight LPI was giving to a particular topic. Also, because the table of contents follow the LPI learning objectives (probably a smart thing), it is often difficult to find documentation about a certain command. For that I might recommend Linux in a Nutshell , 3rd Edition, which serves as a comprehensive index of commands and system utilities. It is excellent. Also, General Linux I Exam Prep (Exam: 101) by Dee Ann LeBlanc (published in 2000), is an extremely helpful book (and available for significantly reduced price used). Although it was one of the first to market and didnt address the LPI objectives explicitly, the exercises and presentation of material are every bit as good as Deans book. Keep in mind also that LPI Linux Certification is not sufficient in and of itself. You will probably end up referring to other books such as Matt Welshs Running Linux, Olaf Kirchs Linux Network Administrator's Guide or the unbelievably good Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition .

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Comment on Linux (Hacking Exposed) by "the_ardvark"

"the_ardvark" — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:21:16 +0000

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

Should have been "Hacking Unix Exposed", July 7, 2001

"the_ardvark" (Chicago, IL) -

This review is from: Linux (Hacking Exposed) (Paperback)

I am in charge of network security for a large firm. We use largely FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines instead of Linux whenever possible. One of the junior folks was trying to convince us that Linux isn't all that bad, and pointed to this book as proof that it can be secured.

Well, we're not about to switch. However this book covered so many unexpected issues that affected our *BSD boxen that we spent a solid week implementing changes on all our systems. The detail of this book was superb, and it was easy to figure out the differences between their Linux-specific solutions and what was needed on our *BSD systems when they weren't exactly the same.

Got Unix? Buy this book.

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Comment on Linux (Hacking Exposed) by "slepp"

"slepp" — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:19:15 +0000

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

Buy two of these, May 30, 2001

"slepp" (Atlanta, GA, USA) -

This review is from: Linux (Hacking Exposed) (Paperback)

I wasn't a fan of Hacking Exposed, largely because its Unix section was a mere 50 pages of superficial, outdated, and obvious fluff. Hacking Linux Exposed makes up for that lack by digging into Unix in much more depth.Though it is modeled after the attack/countermeasure style of the original HE, this book includes a whole chapter of security measures at the beginning that you can implement instantly to get your machine locked down before getting into the nitty-gritty detail about other things in the hacker's arsenal.I was particularly enthralled with chapter 10, which talks about what the hacker will do after they have gained root access, from simple things like adding accounts to complicated issues like kernel modules, complete with source code. Chapter 7 includes some really wonderful examples of how the hacker can abuse networking protocols themselves, something I haven't seen covered in such depth before.The book is logically organized. The first part covers the way the hackers find and probe your machine. The second talks about getting in from the outside, be it network or physical. The third part talks about gaining additional priveleges, and the last part of the book is dedicated to mail, ftp, web, and firewalls. The appendicies are actually useful. They seem to have dropped the small 1-page case studies from the original book and replaced them with longer hacker-eye-views of real attacks which are an interesting read, and really tie the book together.This book is Linux specific in it's countermeasures, but I'd recommend this to any unix user. They do a good job of discussing differences between Linux variants as well, they don't just assume everyone has a RedHat box on their desk. Very refreshing.This book is great for both the theory and practical uses. I could spend weeks implementing all the suggestions they have, but they seem to have thought of this because their risk ratings let you know where you should concentrate as you secure your systems.Like Hacking Exposed, this book also has a website, (...) but it seems more up-to-date -- for example when the ptrace bug in older kernels came out, they posted a kernel module you could compile to protect your system until you could upgrade -- and includes all the source code contained in the book.I bought two of these, one for home and one for the office, and I suggest you do the same.

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Comment on Linux (Hacking Exposed) by Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity.com"

Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity.com" — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:41:56 +0000

55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

Excellence through examples, September 25, 2001

Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity.com" (Metro Washington, DC) -

This review is from: Linux (Hacking Exposed) (Paperback)

I am a senior engineer for network security operations. I read "Hacking Linux Exposed" (HLE) to learn how adversaries compromise Linux hosts. HLE impressed me at every level. I highly recommend system administrators and security personnel read and heed this book's recommendations.

The "Hacking Exposed" series is known for its unique example-driven style. Rather than telling the reader about a technique or problem, the authors demonstrate the issue using command-line examples. I find myself reading with book and laptop at hand, ready to duplicate the authors' sample commands. This process reinforces the authors' message, while the reader learns if a specific problem applies to his situation. Furthermore, by showing exactly how to execute certain commands, the authors impart bits of wisdom and trickery not found elsewhere.

For example, chapter 11 describes attacks and defenses for FTP servers. To explain active and passive FTP sessions, the authors demonstrate running an FTP client with the -d switch to illustrate raw instructions sent by the client over the FTP command channel. I had never seen this switch in use, but as an intrusion detector I constantly see raw FTP instructions like those revealed by the -d switch. These and other tidbits, like using the chattr -i command or setting the "sticky bit", make HLE exceptional.

Beyond these benefits, readers will enjoy clear, thorough explanations of Linux security issues. HLE gives first-rate descriptions of ssh and web man-in-the-middle attacks, race conditions, and FTP data hijacking. HLE also provides great illustrated examples of FTP bounce attacks, giving intrusion detectors the minutiae we need to recognize these techniques. I had heard of most of the compromise methods offered by HLE, but never seen them discussed in such practical detail.

If the material in chapters 1-13 of HLE don't prompt you to verify your Linux host's integrity, then the case studies in appendix D will. The security community needs more of these narratives. These stories, based on true events, show the lengths to which some attacks will go to penetrate target machines.

"Hacking Linux Exposed" is another strong addition to the "Hacking Exposed" series, and the security community will benefit as a result.

(Disclaimer: I received a free review copy from the publisher.)

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Comment on Official Red Hat Linux Administrator’s Guide Reviews by Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 16:26:31 +0000

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Waste of Time and Money, March 6, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Official Red Hat Linux Administrator's Guide (Paperback)

When I first saw the book I was optimistic that I would be getting something that would be useful, this was my first mistake. This book has no value other than good fire starting potential, and that is questionable. Not only is the book unorganized and provides no information for the administration of Red Hat Linux, it has an index that an editor should be ashamed for letting go to press. I will never buy a book edited by REDHAT Press again. It is as if they thought working for Red Had made it alright to sell garbage to the users of Red Hat. Sincerely, Warming by the fire.

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