[CentOS] Good book on Linux Admin (Centos 5.5)

[Les Mikesell]

On 6/3/2011 12:32 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure how someone starting today would find the core tool set
>> (which is almost unchanged today except for the GNU options on some
>> commands and the addition of perl) or where to start with
>> man/google.  Or if these even matter any more now that there are
>> monolithic GUIs to do most common operations and computers are fast
>> enough to run them.
>
> A low barrier to entry is great for development and testing but
> horrible for production.
>
> A GUI or other framework that can assist getting a service up and
> running quickly is a great help; the developer or admin and his
> customer(s) can quickly understand its applicability to the task at
> hand.
>
> Moving that service into production, however, requires a different
> understanding: risk assessment, scalability, configuration boundaries,
> etc. The rapid-development tool rarely provides such insight, with
> predicatable consequences in production.

That's true if you are inventing a new service or deploying it in a way 
that the program/GUI designer didn't anticipate.  Everyone had to do a 
lot of that in the old days when there weren't standard approaches and 
hardware was so expensive you would do some odd things to work around 
its limitations.  But these days it is pretty rare to do something new 
in a production environment, even more so in internal infrastructure, 
and the person doing it probably won't be looking for a beginner 
sysadmin book.  I'm leaning more towards running things that come with 
good defaults and fill-in-the-form choices as much as possible these 
days.  What are the odds that a new sysadmin will build something for a 
typical office that is easier to maintain than, say, ClearOS, with it's 
'just add users' setup and web form administration that you can have 
working without ever wading though the man pages for bash, perl, or sort'?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com