Thomas A. Limoncelli - The Practice of System and Network Administration: Volume 1: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT

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Volume 1

Third Edition

Thomas A. Limoncelli
Christina J. Hogan
Strata R. Chalup

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2016946362

Copyright 2017 Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Lear ne Hogan, Virtual.NET Inc., Lumeta Corporation

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Page 4 excerpt: Nol, Season 2 Episode 10. The West Wing. Directed by Thomas Schlamme. Teleplay by Aaron Sorkin. Story by Peter Parnell. Scene performed by John Spencer and Bradley Whitford. Original broadcast December 20, 2000. Warner Brothers Burbank Studios, Burbank, CA. Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Production, Warner Brothers Television, NBC 2000. Broadcast television.

photos 2017 Christina J. Lear ne Hogan.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-91916-8
ISBN-10: 0-321-91916-5
Text printed in the United States of America.
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This is an unusual book. This is not a technical book. It is a book of strategies and frameworks and anecdotes and tacit knowledge accumulated from decades of experience as system administrators.

Junior SAs focus on learning which commands to type and which buttons to click. As you get more advanced, you realize that the bigger challenge is understanding why we do these things and how to organize our work. Thats where strategy comes in.

This book gives you a frameworka way of thinking about system administration problemsrather than narrow how-to solutions to particular problems. Given a solid framework, you can solve problems every time they appear, regardless of the operating system (OS), brand of computer, or type of environment. This book is unique because it looks at system administration from this holistic point of view, whereas most other books for SAs focus on how to maintain one particular product. With experience, however, all SAs learn that the big-picture problems and solutions are largely independent of the platform. This book will change the way you approach your work as an SA.

This book is Volume 1 of a series. Volume 1 focuses on enterprise infrastructure, customer support, and management issues. Volume 2, The Practice of Cloud System Administration (ISBN: 9780321943187), focuses on web operations and distributed computing.

These books were born from our experiences as SAs in a variety of organizations. We have started new companies. We have helped sites to grow. We have worked at small start-ups and universities, where lack of funding was an issue. We have worked at midsize and large multinationals, where mergers and spinoffs gave rise to strange challenges. We have worked at fast-paced companies that do business on the Internet and where high-availability, high-performance, and scaling issues were the norm. We have worked at slow-paced companies at which high tech meant cordless phones. On the surface, these are very different environments with diverse challenges; underneath, they have the same building blocks, and the same fundamental principles apply.