Choosing a Unix System Administration Textbook?

Smantha writes "I recently began teaching a Unix System Administration course at a community college. The previous instructor was using a very outdated textbook, and I'm trying to find one that is a bit more advanced and useful for my students. They are required to take a 100-level Unix class before this one and are familiar with the basics of using the command line. I'm looking for something that covers topics such as OS installation, software/package installation, user management, system administration tools, troubleshooting techniques and tools, service configuration (network services, for example) and some miscellaneous topics such as compression/archive tools, grep, make, and the like. What books have you found to be good references on your desk? What books have been good for learning these sorts of topics?"

The Unix System Administration Handbook...

[segfaultcoredump]

Define "too old".

For an entry level class, you need to start with the classic: UNIX System Administration Handbook (3rd Edition, 2000) by Evi Nemeth, et al. If you want to focus on linux, you can go with Linux Administration Handbook (2nd Edition, 2006) by the same authors.

Once you learn the basics, you need to pick a flavor and dive in with more "up to date" stuff. Something that covers zones, smf and zfs for solaris folks. I'm sure there are new features to linux, but I cant think of any at the OS level that dont vary widely by distro :-) (dont get me started, my biggest annoyance with "linux" is that everybody follows their own "standard" for how to configure the system.)

Unix is 30+ years old and the basics still have not changed in a very, very long time. Its like complaining that a programing class is still using a 10+ year old book to explain looping and variable scoping.

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Re:Don't!!

[26199]

I fully agree. I'll take a HOWTO over a book any day!

Find a book to fit the class, not the other way.

[HomerJ]

It seems like you have an idea of what you want this class to be. The idea isn't to just pick a text because it's "good". It's to pick a book that has the same ideas you want to teach. You may find a "good" textbook, and just don't believe in certain philosophies in the book. You don't want to keep having to go "well, it's like this in the book, but it's better to do it my way". If you've fleshed out your ideas into actual lesson plans, it may just be better to bypass a book, and strictly go on course notes. Like I said, the main factor in this will be finding a book that melds with what you want to do.

Books people have mentioned, such as the ORA books, ARE good references. But they aren't text books, and it probably isn't a good idea to use them like one.

My suggestion, would be to read though some of the options here. However, if none match with what you planned, good course notes and classroom time would be the better idea. Especially if there are ideas that a book present that go against what you are teaching. You don't want students that have two conflicting ideas about a topic.

I'll go out on a limb here.....

[iamsamed]

I understand that in an academic environment the powers that be demand you have a textbook, but why not teach them yourself and have a textbook for reference?

I once had a class where the instructor said there wasn't any decent textbook but the administration demanded that he have one. He told us to get some really cheap ass book that had all the information that he taught. BUT....it DID NOT have the information in the style this brilliant teacher could give. In other words, we listened, took notes, asked questions, and ignored the damn requirement to get the textbook.

This was at Georgia State U. for those of you who want to know. The instructor went on to much, much better things.

Re:Don't!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to work at Google someday, you will need to demonstrate to them that you can get Google's servers back up and running... without being able to Google things. ;-)

It's helpful to have a dead-tree reference for a piece of software or hardware that you'll be using often.

Re:I'll go out on a limb here.....

[techno-vampire]

That instructor was not only good, he was more honest than most people would have been in his position. The normal response to that situation is to write your own text book, require that all your students use it and come out with new editions regularly with only minor changes to keep them from buying used copies. Many professors have financed their retirements by doing exactly that.

Re:Recommendations

[digitalhermit]

Excellent advice...

I'd also recommend "Time Management for System Administrators". It's one of the best books I've read and has helped me immensely in prioritizing and scheduling my work.

Re:The Unix System Administration Handbook...

[techno-vampire]

You forgot one of the most important books:

Clickedy-Click! by Simon the BOFH [ntk.net]

It's one of the classics, and no Unix administrator's education would be complete without it.

Re:Don't!!

[jgrahn]

also choose bash/tsh based on your audience, if its a mac crowd tsh is going to be more useful but if its a linux crowd stick with bash

Do you mean tcsh? I sincerely hope noone writes shell scripts in csh or tcsh these days. I still kind of like tcsh as an interactive shell, but it's a dead end for scripting.

Also, I like bash scripting, but you should primarily teach the POSIX shell subset. Even Linux distributions try to avoid bashisms in their scripts.

Use several, and make your own

[arcade]

Okay, so you want to teach people Unix.

First off, it's important that you know unix yourself. Then it is important to explain the unix philosophy, and start with the basics. Since I do a bit of unix teaching, I think I'll put forward how I prefer to teach my pupils.

First off, it's important that they know the basic philosophy.
  - Everything is a file
  - Many small utilities, that does its own little thing
  - Utilities can be combined.

Choose a decent shell, and teach them how to use it. bash seems to be the industry standard, so go for that (or go for whatever you want, but be certain that you know it yourself).

Then teach them about STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR.

Explain that each utility they launch have those three file descriptors. Teach them pipes. Explain that pipes connects STDOUT from one process to STDIN of another. Explain that you can redirect STDERR to STDOUT to include it in the pipe. Explain that you can connect STDOUT to a file. Explain that you can connect a file to STDIN.

Explain command line substitution (backticks).

Then go forth and explain the basic utilities. Explain how to use 'man' and 'apropos' (or man -k). Explain the other basics such as cat, grep, cut, tr, find, xargs, df, kill (man signal), pkill, the evils of killall, ifconfig, netstat, and so forth. Explain how you can use pipes with these utilities. When they've mastered the basic utilities, move on to explaining sed and awk.

When they've understood these basics, which they should after some 3-4 lectures + training sessions - they can move on to the more advanced stuff.

Explain about filesystem hiarchies. Explain the basics of filesystems and what inodes are. Explain atime, mtime, ctime. Explain how to use fdisk (or format if solaris). Explain how to create filesystems - and why inode density might be important. Explain why it's important with different partitions / disks. Then move on to explaining volume management.

At some point, they should read "Learning the bash shell" (or a similiar book for other shells), and learn shell scripting.
At some point, they should choose themselves another scripting language, be it perl, python, ruby or something else.

After they are past these basics, you should start talking about actual system administration. They are now ready to move on to topics such as how to configure syslogging, NFS and how to configure the local mailer daemon. After that they should now have had to touch the MX records, and DNS might pique their interest. Teach them bind. Then teach them another DNS daemon just to show that there are more of them. djbdns might be a good alternative.

If you're evil, this might be a good time to teach them to hate printing by trying to explain to them how to configure a print-server. Make sure there are some evil printers around. It's important to teach them about both postscript-printers and the evils of non-postscript printers.

After all this, they should have a toolchest big enough to be able to do the rest themselves. They're ready to be self-taught for the rest of whatever they need to do.

Re:I'll go out on a limb here.....

[mewsenews]

And the worst professors will have "lectures" where they recite word-for-word the information contained in the textbook, making the students feel like they've wasted time, money, and their own sense of worth.

Christ, university can be soul crushing.