Customer Reviews

Linux Server Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The challenge: Accessing my Linux workstation at work from my Linux workstation at home.
A colleage suggested I take a look at SSH port forwarding. I did a quick read through the man page and tried a few things to no avail. As I say back in frustration I noticed a book on my shelf that had say unread for several months. A quick scan of Linux Server Hack and I had a solution that allowed me to create a sort of poor man's VPN.
Buy this book. Read it. It will pay for itself in increased productivity.

Gives clear and succint solutions to a set of common problems that Linux admins or users may run into. I like the cookbook style approach and the concise format.

This well written guidebook covers a hundred real-life time saving scripts and command-line magic.
Everything your local *nix guru knows that you don't; narrow the gap!

Highlights include CVS commands, creating unchangeable files (even by root!), filtering
and organizing apache log files (for example, listing the top 20 broken links, sorted
and numbered by frequency of occurrence), modifying the titlebar to display load average,
host, current directory, etc., ntop and httptop and much more.

I've been using *nix for 6 years now, and I found this book both a refreshing review of
previously known concepts as well as a great introduction to some new utilities and tools.

This book is less about Linux internals and more about certain tools that are "commonly" associated with Linux. The tips I liked most were about using ssh keys to avoid typing-in the password. Interestingly, this tip saved me a lot of trouble on a Windows machine. Here is how: I use WinCVS and CygWin's ssh to connect to a CVS Server. Without the proper setup, ssh prompted me to enter password for every CVS operation. But with setting up the keys as explained in this book, I can work with WinCVS without being interrupted every minute.

If you want some really good tips into making your port of linux better and more efficient, this is your book!

The technical hints and tips in this book are unmatched. But the way flickenger referrs to hackers as 'naturally anti-authoritarian' in the beginning is simply stupid. It brings down the whole meaning of a hacker. He sounds just like cnn or nbc in the beginning of this book. If you buy it, skip the first 10 pages and jump right into the tips and code.

I found this book quite helpful. Since I am a sysadmin, I need to often attempt various configurations and installtions. For example, just the other day, feeling a bit bored, I flipped open to the "Fun with /proc" section and played around. All in all, fun stuff if you are a Linux enthusiast.

This is a good book for Linux enthusiasts, and a great book for sys admins. The book covers a wide range of material, and while I'm likely to only use a fraction of the tips in the book, it is a good resource for ideas. The book covers most functions that a server is required to perform, in addition to monitoring the server itself.
The hacks are organized into sections based on the function they are related to, i.e., basics, networking, SSH, etc. The hacks in any given section vary widely, so it is nice to have a general idea where information about particular aspects can be found.
The author clearly has a good grasp of the material, and does a good job in communicating the information. This is not a book for beginners, and those who are fairly new should get more experience with Linux before attempting to read this.

I can't help myself not to begin this review with a big *thanks* to O'Reilly for choosing Linux to launch this new series.
First thing that crossed my mind after opening this tiny book, was a notion of close resemblance with another O'Reilly book that I read recently, "Unix Power Tools". Book is organized in almost identical way, short articles (anything from a page or two, to several pages) that are presented with a clear writing style, examples and efficient layout. Articles are cross-referenced in such a way that you can easily start reading the book from whatever end you wish.
The hacks that I like the most are those in chapters on Server Basics, Backups, SSH and Information Servers (BIND, Apache, MySQL, OpenSSL). If you're hardcore Linux sysadmin you'll probably appreciate hacks in other chapters too; Networking, Revision Control and Monitoring. For me, the most challenging hacks in this book are the ones that deal with tunneling (IPIP/GRE encapsulation, vtun over SSH), due to complete lack of experience on my side, otherwise I found the book well worth the price and time to read, even if you'll end up with only one or two implemented hacks in your production environment. (If I could only say this more often in my reviews :-).
Keep in mind, this is not the book that'll likely collect the dust on your bookshelf after you'll read it. Mine is always close to the Linux box that I manage (in a good company with already mentioned "Unix Power Tools").

I'm really looking forward to other books from O'Reilly Hacks series, what about 100 hacks on Oracle, MySQL, regular expressions "one liners" (with sed, awk, grep, perl...), Windows NT...

This is a great book for anyone who uses Linux. Many of the tips are simple and straight forward. Anyone who has a specific need would probably come up with the same idea by doing a little research on the web. But most of the tips are head-slapping, "Wow, I shoulda thought of that!" kind of tips! Rob Flickenger not only shows some really cool tips, but is a great example of how linux commands should be used: by combining them into features that the original coders hadn't even thought of! The sections on server performance and backups were especially helpful for me. I'm guessing that this 100 tips is only the tip of the iceberg and I would really like to see more.