Wes Ritchey March 15, 2001

Linux Network Administrator's Guide is yet another comprehensive and invaluable book from O'Reilly's Linux series. The book is taken from the Linux Documentation Project, covering the networking areas in a nicely compiled fashion, edited to be more concise, readable and understandable.

Chapters One and Two of the book give novice readers a nice overview of networking in general as well as a focus on TCP/IP issues. Various protocols, UUCP, TCP/IP, hardware and security are all touched upon in these chapters.

Chapters Three and Four deal configuring network hardware and serial hardware. The authors cover everything from building a kernal to setting up an ethernet card to UUCP in these two chapters.

Chapter Five begins to actually get the reader into the meat of administration with TCP/IP networking. Chapter Six examines Name Service and Resolver Configuration in Linux.

Chapters Seven and Eight work together to cover SLIP and PPP. I found many helpful hints in the discussion of the PPP daemon in Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine discusses network security with the narrower topic of TCP/IP firewalls, a must for anyone wishing to set up their own public server using Linux.

Chapters Ten and Eleven delve into the world of IPs. IP Accounting, IP Masquerade and Network Address Translation are all thoroughly covered in this section.

Chapters Twelve through Fourteen introduce and discuss many of the network features available. Tools such as rlogin, ssh, NIS and NFS are covered in these chapters.

Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen reach a bit outside the Linux norm and cover integrating a Novell Netware environment and the implementation of TaylorUUCP into a Linux network system.

Chapters Seventeen through Nineteen deal primarily with the various modes of electronic mail. Covered in these chapters are the basic concepts behind mail as well as the primary mail transport agents; sendmail and exim.

Chapters Twenty through Twenty Four cover usenet news. Examined in these chapters are the nntp, C News and INN software packages for managing Usenet, NNTP and the NNTP daemon as well as a final chapter on configuring news readers.

This book is an excellent resource of the varying elements of networking and network services available for and through Linux. While the information is presented in a dry, technical style, the answers to practically all of your Linux networking questions are included.

Since this book is essentially available in it's entire form on line, some have asked the question; "Why should I buy this book?" While financial constraints are always an obstacle, I found the book's edited version to be much more user friendly, better organized and much more readable than the on line Linux Documentation Project.

Get this book if you are a Linux system administrator who would like to have a handy, invaluable reference around or if you are just starting your own Linux networking project. It will save you hours of on line searching.

Olaf Kirch & Terry Dawson
O'Reilly & Associates
ISBN: 1565924002
474 Pages
$39.95 (US)

Copyright 2001, Wes Ritchey, All Rights Reserved