Open Source Network Administration

• James M. Kretchmar
• Prentice Hall PTR
• 0130462101

Order (or just read more about) Open Source Network Administration  from Amazon.com

Operating Systems: Solaris, and Linux tested, but should be fine on all *nix's
Skill level: Beginner to Intermediate

The title to this book sounded interesting, so I decided to purchase it. The book covers several different Open Source tools, and I was pleased to find that the author picked a few of them that I use to manage my network. Many tools for monitoring, and troubleshooting networks are included; Sysmon, Oak, Neo, MRTG, tcpdump, netstat, traceroute, etc.. are all covered. I have personally been using Sysmon for several years now, and find it to be an easy to use system monitoring program. The author does a nice job of explaining how to configure Sysmon, and also offers an alternative if Sysmon is not enough for your network. In this case, he recommends Nagios. In fact, the author tends to recommend alternative tools for each section of the book, which I found useful.

The author tends to repeat himself while explaining how to gunzip, untar, and run the ./configure, make, and make install for each source package, which may be nice for beginners, but tends to be a little repetitive for more experienced admins. There are also some beginner chapters on writing shell, and perl code to glue all the tools together. Fundamental shell scripting is explained in detail, with easy to understand examples for beginners. The author also touches on some basics of regular expressions. Kretchmar uses an easy to understand style of writing, and always offers additional information for further study. I also had no trouble using the Index, when trying to locate specific information. If you are currently a network admin, or a junior admin, I highly recommend this book. Depending on your network infrastructure, I'm sure you will find a tool in here that is as capable as an expensive commercial product, or more capable than the commercial products available.

I have always been drawn to Open Source because of the endless learning that is possible with the source code, and the inspiration you receive when you have the ability to dig in deep and learn about how things happen. With the tools covered in this book, and some intuition, you could easily build a commercial grade network monitoring system, that exceeds the features of commercially available software.

Comments?

More Articles by Bruce Garlock

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.