Reviews for Solaris Administration: A Beginner's Guide (Network Professional's Library)

1. Excellent for Windows Admins

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, May 12rd, 2002

   I am not a Linux user or Solaris admin - I am an experienced NT/2000 administrator who has been asked to run a Sparc system for our database (Oracle). I found this book to be the most helpful introduction to specific UNIX services - like NIS, for instance, which I'd never encountered before. Full marks to the author on this fine achievement.

2. NOT what it says on the tin - avoid!

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2001

   This book is pitched as a way for "experienced" Linux and Windows NT Administrators to get into Solaris. In fact it is a lightweight Solaris promotional manual pitched almost solely at Windows admins.

   The first part covers an introduction to Solaris, where the author makes a number of glaring technical errors (last time I checked, IDE stood for Integrated Drive Electronics, when referring to disks), and installing Solaris on SPARC and Intel hardware.

   The second part covers the CDE window manager, and offers little advice that could not be picked up from the online help or your own experience. Throughout, there is emphasis on "avoiding the command line" for Windows Admins. Another wonderful error: "Windows only uses the left mouse button" - when did the author last look at a windows machine?

   Finally we are given an overview of some common internet services - information that is all provided elsewhere in more depth. Only the sections on NFS, NIS+ and (possibly) samba have any place here. It would have been better if the author had pointed the reader to other sources for reference material on Sendmail and Apache, and concentrated on proper Systems Administration topics.

   My principle gripe with this book is that it is not a manual for experienced SysAds. There is nothing in here about backups or complex networking issues, or anything else that an "experienced" administrator would want to know about.

   The vaunted "blueprints" give a tantalising insight into what this book could have been. Ignoring the first few that could have been written by Sun to promote Solaris, the detail on the Solaris boot sequence is the kind of information that I was looking for - unfortunately it is the only place in the book that this is mentioned.

   This book is a poor first introduction to UNIX systems administration for Windows Admins. It is a VERY poor introduction to Solaris for experienced UNIX admins. There are better introductions to Systems Administration for the novice as well. I am very disappointed.