Business Development, Strategy Alignment and Consulting News from The Business City London -

Jan. 2002,
300 pages, Softcover
ISBN: 0-5960-0073-1

Published by o'Reilly

List Price: $39.95 US, $59.95 CA, £28.50 UK

Level: All Levels

available

This guide covers all aspects of deploying Solaris as an enterprise-level network operating system, with a focus on e-commerce. Written for experienced network administrators who want an objective guide to networking with Solaris, the book covers installation on the Intel and Sparc platforms, and instructs you how to setup Solaris as a file server, application server, and database server.

Book Description

The Solaris operating system, along with related Sun products like Java, is one of the most reliable and scalable platforms on which to build e-commerce products, and on which to support all networked services. Yet, one problem that potential users face is finding out more information about what Solaris offers. In a sense, they want to know how much technical work is involved in migrating to Solaris, and what kind of philosophy Solaris is based on.

To answer these questions, Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide covers all aspects of deploying Solaris as a network server, including both basic and advanced network services. Given newfound interest in Solaris as an enterprise network operating system, this guide is aimed squarely at supporting enterprise-level services. It's written for experienced network administrators who want an objective guide to networking with Solaris, and covers installation on both the Intel and Sparc platforms. With it, you will learn how to setup Solaris as a file server, application server, and database server.

In its coverage of advanced topics, Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide offers examples of configuration files and the installation of third-party software packages. This comprehensive book also contains more conceptual and difficult material that is absent from other Solaris reference manuals. At all points, emphasis is placed on issues like evaluating the security, scalability, and reliability of specific software packages--at the expense of providing detailed coverage of every available package.

The book covers the practical experience and new skills needed to understand the impact of new services and new software products on existing server systems. Author Paul Watters--a recognized authority on Solaris--avoids so-called "historical" services, like UUCP, which can easily fill chapters but are not commonly found in today's production environments. Indeed, he doesn't bother to provide an in-depth history of Solaris or UNIX at all, assuming that you can find this material elsewhere. Instead, the practical focus is on supporting relevant contemporary networking technologies.

Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide provides you with a third-party view that not only praises Solaris, but is critical and realistic in its assessment. This book is for experienced Solaris Administrators as well as and those looking to migrate to this operating system.

Pre Review

We found the structure of the book in line with the quality it should have.

Printing mistakes were not found. The descriptive displays of methodologies were well set up.

Rating Areas	Rating
Quality of Information	C
Easiness of understanding	B
Learning success, close to reality	C
Cover Design and Layout	B
Quality for Money value	BC

Final Review

The idea of this ook is clear but the chapters are too thin to get anywhere really. As a quickreference this book might be uite good but we have chosen this publication in order to have it checked by our Unix / Linux expert Gerd who has plenty experince in this field to give an honest judgement.

We can call this book a quick guide as the topics Samba, DNS, NFS, SSL, Security are worked through in such a short time that there is hardly any time to go into details.

This book will be quite fine for the beginner needing to get to grip with the different phrases and concepts behind solaris. After this, the beginner will need to build on the first basic introductory and choose other deeper content literature by o'Reilly.

About the Author

Paul A. Watters, MAPS, M.Phil.(Cambridge),B.A.(Hons.)(Tasmania),B.A. (Newcastle) recently submitted his PhD thesis in computer science at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, in the topic of natural language processing, and neural networks.

The software he developed as part of his doctoral thesis runs on high-end Solaris servers through the Internet using CGI. In addition, he has eight years systems management and application development experience in commercial and R&D organizations. He specializes in building e-commerce and Internet information systems, based on Java, Solaris and open standards like CORBA.

He is a columnist and author for the trade journal Inside Solaris, author of Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide, lead author of the upcoming Solaris 8: The Complete Reference, published by Osborne McGraw-Hill, and Solaris E-Commerce Bible, published by IDG

German Comments: (Gerd Schuster )

In O'Reilly's Buch Solaris 8 Administratior's Guide von Paul Watters werden für ein Admin-Guide die jeweiligen Kapitel leider nur sehr knapp beschrieben.

Sämtliche Netzwerkthemen wie TCP/IP-Grundlagen, Samba, DNS, NFS, SSL, Security, und vieles mehr werden auf grade mal 275 Seiten versucht zu erläutern. Also eher ein Beginne'r-Guide angehender Netzwerk-Admin's. Dabei gehen die grundlegenden und tiefer eingehenden SysAdmin-Thematiken unter.

Für ein O-Reilly's Buch habe ich weit aus mehr erwartet.

Result

This book is a great help for the guy needing help with ssh!

Review done by: Gerd Schuster & Christian Bartsch, Consultants