Essential System Administration
Pocket Reference
by Æleen Frisch · first published 1991
63% recommend32% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Broad, practical guide to Unix system administration concepts. It serves as a strong starting point for general sysadmin knowledge and as a long-lived reference for working admins.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…everything from "I have one website" to "I run a dozen data centers with thousands of zones and thousands of queries per second" (and the authors have significant experience at all of those levels). And Essential System Administration is a classic, though a bit dated the last time I looked at it (I mean, the core services and concepts it covers are relatively timeless, but it's missing a lot of modern cloud and service-based concepts).…
on “Humble Book Bundle: Unix” ↗…BSD General Commands Manual BSDTAR(1) NAME tar -- manipulate tape archives Tape. Your statement is an indication that what you really need is to read AEleen Frisch's Essential System Administration so that the UNIX concepts would sink in, because if you're making such statements, you're just not there yet.
on “Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS” ↗…1995, but was floored by the seemingly limitless capabilities of Unix userland utilities under the control of ksh. At first I made due with the man pages, but soon started studying Aeleen Frisch's classic Essential System Administration, and finally got hold of the O'Reilly animal book for Korn. I eventually moved on to bash after helping convince my company to get on RHEL, but those formative experiences with ksh will stay with me forever.…
on “Korn Meets KoRN” ↗…hurt that BIND is damned near universal in usage, so odds are extremely high it's the DNS server you use. The Frisch book is probably a great start for general concepts, though: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-System-Administration-Third-... It's been ten or more years since I've read it, but it's been updated every few years, and is probably due for a new edition any day now actually. The concepts it covers (backups with standard…
on “Sysadmin mistakes start-ups make” ↗AElien Frisch wrote a good book: Essential System Administration (3rd ed), http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=978059600... Some/all of her books: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/678#Books Her O'Reilly articles: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/678#Books…
on “Ask HN: Linux Adminstration Course for non-sysadmins?” ↗take everything in essential system administration by aeleen frisch and automate it. done.
on “Ask HN: How do I learn DevOps?” ↗Totally agree, DNS and Bind and Essential System Administration alone are completely worth it if you're at all interested in (using) Unix-like systems. As for being dated, I think simply reading (and understanding) Essential System Administration and then spending…
on “Humble Book Bundle: Unix” ↗…non-experts navigate some of this stuff, what with the often incomplete doc and horribly uninformed (or just plain reckless) forum posts they have to work with. The best place to start is still æLeen Frisch's Essential System Administration (whose 1st ed is where I learned the sysadmin craft), but there really isn't much beyond it (unless you go the BSD route and so have the FreeBSD Handbook to lean on).
on “Start Self Hosting” ↗…update, and niche discovery. I attribute this advice to Æleen Frisch; albeit without pulling my very dog-eared copy from the stacks, I recall that words to similar effect can be found in the epochal Essential System Administration (2002), possibly in the form of reading every manpage in your local Unix base system.
on “Those HTML attributes you never use” ↗I consider 3 books essential reading for system administration. "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth & Snyder, "Essential System Administration" by Aeleen Frisch and "TCP/IP Guide" by Kozierok. Yes, they're quite old but the expertise of these authors can't really be dated. Craig Hunt's "TCP/IP Network Administration" (2002) is also still worth…
on “The Lost Art of System Administration” ↗O'Reilly's Essential System Administration [1], I never do a job interview without it. [1]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/essential-system-admini...
on “What does " 2>&1 " mean?” ↗"UNIX in a Nutshell" and "Essential System Administration" helped kick-start my career back in '95-96, and I'll always be grateful for that. I was in their "O'Reilly Irregulars" group a few years ago, where folks volunteered to go inventory/catalog the ORA…
on “A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them” ↗10 years old now (and that's the 3rd edition), but still a good tome: Essential System Administration from ORA http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003432.do
on “Is there a server admin guide for noobs?” ↗Yes, Essential System Administration is good. I've read some of it. But I think it is more oriented for sysadmins, while the Linux Command Line book is for beginners, who may or not go on to become sysadmins. Aside: One of the good points…
on “The History of the Design of Unix’s Find Command (1995)” ↗ISTR it was Æleen Frisch (author of Essential System Administration) who recommended that all nix admins take one day a year to read through the entire manual sections (1) and (8), which I implemented thus: $ cd /usr/bin ; man (and repeat for other bindirs) You will…
on “Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes” ↗