Linux Server Hacks Author: Rob Flickenger Pages: 221 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates ISBN: 0-596-00461-3 Summary: Lotsa hacks, lotsa Linux, lotsa fun. Review Date: 10 Apr, 2003

Linux Server Hacks brings back to life the genre pioneered by the O'Reilly classic UNIX Power Tools. Linux Server Hacks is a collection of short articles about a wide array of topics in Linux server administration. While not as overwhelmingly vast as UNIX Power Tools, at just over 200 pages, Linux Server Hacks is lightweight, and very readable, but still provides plenty of useful tips for making your life as a Linux system administrator easier.

Written in colloquial sysadmin-ese, Flickenger gives us once again the grainy humor we enjoyed in Building Wireless Community Networks, that humor which only a veteran sysadmin could muster in describing these various hacks. If you're a programmer, you may not appreciate the finer points of this humor, but if you've worn the sysadmin hat for any amount of time you're sure to find yourself chuckling often as you peruse the pages. Beyond the humor, however is a lot of helpful knowledge. Flickenger knows his stuff, and we get to be the lucky beneficiaries of that knowledge. It's this combination of laughs and 'Oh, cool!' moments that make the book so enjoyable to read.

Each hack is a stand-alone recipe that you can read in just a few minutes. Each hack also contains 'links' to other related hacks in the book, as well as additional resources you can consult for the given topic. Because of this organization, you can read the book cover to cover, or dive in somewhere in the middle and see where it takes you. As a side note, the word 'hack' is here used in a complimentary way, suggesting a clever or quick and dirty solution to some problem, as opposed to the negative connotation given to blackhats who make buffer-overflows an art form.

The book's chapters include:

• Server Basics
• Revision Control
• Backups
• Networking
• Monitoring
• SSH
• Scripting
• Information Servers

While the book is useful and fun to read, it's not quite perfect. I found a few scattered errors in the references at the end of some hacks. Throughout the book there were quite a few typographical errors, such as HTML entities that hadn't been processed right in the production. Also, most of the code and conf file examples lack indentation, which can lead to confusion at times. For the most part, however, these things are minor, and only detract slightly from the overall usefulness of the book. The target audience of experienced sysadmins should be able to figure out what's up in most cases.

So who will be able to use this book? If you're a complete newby, perhaps start with Running Linux, or Linux in a Nutshell. The author assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge of his readers, but newbies may be able to find things that help at any rate. If you're looking for Solaris or other *nix tips, this book probably aint for you either, although some of the hacks could be generalized to other Unices. If you're an absolute wizard, then you probably know all this stuff already, so go back to your cave and keep hacking. If you're somewhere in the middle like most of us, then you'll likely enjoy and find very useful Linux Server Hacks.

As for myself, I found a lot of little tricks here and there that make my day easier, such as turbo-mode ssh logins, using netstat to see which processes (by name) are holding which ports open, and more easily managing running processes with pgrep and pkill. A lot of the hacks are ways of utilizing tools you may be familiar with but in ways you may not have thought of. Want exotic filesystem features like snapshots, but without the expense? How about a concise recipe for MySQL replication? These and much more can be found in the book.

Written by a sysadmin, for sysadmins, Linux Server Hacks makes a great bathroom book for any geek on your gift list.

Overall rating: 9/10