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Introduction

Welcome to the Practical Guide to UNIX System Administration! This Guide was designed to provide baseline knowledge for UNIX system administrators. While it certainly isn't inclusive, it should contain most of the information you need to effectively run a UNIX system. I've attempted to make this guide as straightforward as possible - there's nothing worse than documentation that beats around the bush.

The chapters that the Guide consists of are designed to stand on their own - my personal belief is that if you want information about setting up a printer you shouldn't have to read the previous nine chapters of documentation to understand it. Each chapter assumes a basic familiarity with the UNIX operating system, but that's about it.

Writing UNIX documentation always leads to a problem: every flavor of UNIX is just a little bit different. Fortunately most of the major flavors of UNIX available today are more or less compatible with each other. Just to be safe, I've written this Guide around two of the most popular UNIX flavors available today - Linus Torvald's Linux and Sun Microsystems' Solaris. I've tested all of my examples on Solaris 2.8 (AKA Solaris 8) for both the SPARC and Intel x86 architectures, and on RedHat Linux 6.2 for the Intel x86 architecture. These two flavors of UNIX are cheap, stable, relatively standard, and everybody uses them. Most other flavors of UNIX are based on or around (or at least try to maintain compatibility with) Solaris and Linux. If you're using a flavor of UNIX other than Solaris or Linux and want to send me specific instructions, I'd be happy to include them in this Guide.

This Guide is reasonably complete and accurate. If you find a glaring mistake, feel free to drop me a line and tell me about it. I stay pretty busy so it might take me a week or two to make the correction, but I promise I'll get to it eventually.

I hope you find this Guide helpful. Happy administrating!