Useful Links
Reference Books
"Principles of Network and System Administration" (2nd Edition), by Mark Burgess, John Wiley & Sons
"The Practice of System and Network Administration" (2nd Edition), by Limoncelli and Hogan, Addison Wesley
"Time Management for System Administrators", by Tom Limoncelli, O'Reilly
"Systems Performance", by Brendan Gregg, Prentice Hall
"Linux Network Administrators Guide" (3rd Edition), by Bautts, Dawson and Purdy, O'Reilly
"Real World Linux Security--Intrusion Prevention, Detection, and Recovery", by Bob Toxen, Prentice Hall
Links for System Administrators
BOFH official archive (Anti-patterns for System Admin ethics)
Introductory Material
Useful background material for familiarising yourself with the environment.
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nux Network Administrators Guide
- Introduction to Linux
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If you are not familiar with working in a Linux/UNIX command-line environment, then this will help you to come up to speed.
"Linux Network Administrators Guide/
IPv6
Major IPv6 content was introduced in 2010. Here are some useful links to resources that will be of use when considering the lectures.
- Linux IPv6 HOWTO
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This is a fairly comprehensive (though incomplete) coverage of dealing with IPv6 in Linux. Best read in conjunction with something that has more details of IPv6 standards.
Unix Environment/Philosophy/Design
- The Art of Unix Programming
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I use this as a recommended reading for my scripting lecture. It also serves as a good counterpoint to The Unix Haters Handbook.
- The Unix Haters Handbook
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Because Unix is definately not perfect, and it is very enlightening to see the sort of rather cool stuff that came before it, especially as some of it is re-introduced in more mainstream systems.
- BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO
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This document is referenced in the scripting lecture.
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
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This document is mentioned as a follow-up resource in the scripting lecture.
- Unofficial BASH FAQ
- Common BASH Mistakes
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These are both very good resources, particularly the BASH Mistakes (I’ve caught myself making some of them, namely using function when declaring a function). Gives a good idea of portability issues also.
- Monad Manifesto
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Not about Unix per-se, but very useful for understanding a better shell environment. Monad is the code-name of Windows PowerShell, and in my opinion, is the sort of environment that the Unix shell should have evolved to (or started out as).
- Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century
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Talks more generally about the different between scripting languages and system programming languages. Written by the father of the Tcl scripting language, John K. Ousterhout. Note the age, Python is more the flavour de-jour.
- Cron Sandbox
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This site lets you enter a crontab specification and see when it would be run; useful, but bear in mind there are some edge-cases that are different in different cron implementations, and there are many cron implementations.
Interesting Security Papers
- Cisco SAFE Layer 2 Security In-depth
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This is a good read. It relates to things I have said about security in the DHCP lab, and has some good coverage of the security aspects and issues with VLANs.
Network Design/Subnetting etc.
- subnettingquestions.com
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Highly recommended! This site generates good subnetting questions you can test yourself against. It doesn't teach you the theory or practice, but just provides a very good resource for those subnetting questions which we all find rather challenging at times.
An example question: “Which subnet does host 172.18.235.132/26 belong to?” An excellent resource when studying towards certification (CCNA in particular gives you lots of subnetting questions).
CISCO Management
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Palaestra Training have put out some full-length samples of some of the training videos they produce. One of them is a CCNA (Cisco Cert.) training video on Frame Relay, which is a common WAN connection. I found it well worth looking at.
They also have a video on RAID and SCSI Concepts and Securing your Home Network, which is part of their A+ certification series, though I have not looked at that yet.
Both A+ and CCNA are very good certifications to get (I should really make an effort on that front myself), so you might want to consider saving up to buy some training materials, such as these videos.
By the way, this movie is not hosted on campus, so please watch it from off-campus.
Regular Expressions
- Know your regular expressions–IBM developerWorks
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You may find this useful for learning about some tools you can use to hone your regular expression skills. The links at the end of this should be useful.
Anecdotes
- Java Takes Down the Network – The Daily WTF
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A useful observation on the non-technical observations of the job.