Who Should Buy This Book

This book is designed to be an advanced tutorial and reference for those with some Linux networking experience, or at least some Linux and some networking experience. The first few chapters cover low-level configuration, including such factors as getting the network up and running to begin with; but I assume you're already familiar with Linux, or at least UNIX, and with basic networking terminology. If you're not familiar with these things, an introductory Linux system administration book, such as Marcel Gagn 's Linux System Administration: A User's Guide (Addison-Wesley, 2002) or Vicki Stanfield's and my Linux System Administration (Sybex, 2001) should help fill in the gaps.

If you want to learn a bit more about big servers like Apache or Samba but don't want to buy dedicated books for them, or if you want to learn about the small but potentially important servers like xntpd or xfs , then this is the book for you. This book also covers miscellaneous networking topics, like how to start and stop servers, backing up a network, running a server in a chroot jail, and using iptables . Knowing these topics will help fill out your networking knowledge base and make you better able to adapt to new requirements and generally improve the networks you administer.

In writing this book, I imagined the audience to be administrators of small or mid- sized networks. Your network might be dominated by Linux, UNIX, Windows, MacOS, or something even more exotic, but of course you've got at least one Linux system. Most chapters describe the basic principles upon which a tool is built and then describe how to use the tool. You should, therefore, be able to learn a lot about the tools by reading this book, but you can also use this book as a quick reference. I aim for this to be the book you would choose if you could have just one Linux networking book.