Foreword

Though Red Hat has been developing, contributing, and maintaining documentation since the early days, there has never been an Official Red Hat Linux Administrator’s Guide until now. Perhaps that is because just a few years ago, running Linux was a very personal decision, and the documentation one needed (beyond the source, of course) was an installation guide and perhaps a user’s guide. Today, Linux can do more than ever before, and it is being used in more ways by more people than ever before. For those who need or want to do more than just run an “out-of-the-box” configuration (or for those who want to make new “out-of-the-box” configurations that they can distribute to their users or customers), this is the guide that brings together, in one place, the knowledge Red Hat has gained in (1) talking directly with developers of key packages, (2) working with partners and customers who have deployed (or tried to deploy) particular solutions, and (3) our own experience of building an enterprise infrastructure using Red Hat Linux and other open-source technologies.

Which tool is better, a screwdriver or a hammer? A ball-peen hammer or a sledgehammer? What metal is best — steel, aluminum, or titanium? Which wood is best — balsa wood, oak, or angelique? Should you buy a mahogany log, get a pre-cut board, or grow your own? Of course, the answer to all these questions is “it depends on the job to be done, the resources, and time available.” With over 1,400 packages, Red Hat Linux 8.0 is both a tool chest and a warehouse, providing the tools and materials necessary to turn ordinary PCs into firewalls, file and print servers, Web servers, file servers, desktops, point-of-sale terminals, and more. This Administrator’s Guide provides an outline and an index to help administrators configure, customize, deploy, and manage Red Hat Linux with customer-proven approaches to real-world problems.

This book owes much to the open-source approach that Red Hat has embraced and has come to represent. First, without the open-source community, there would be no Red Hat Linux to document. Second, without their amazing and prolific technology innovations, there would not be anything really complex or interesting to document. Third, without the variety of solutions that the open-source community has developed in response to the variety of real-world problems to be solved, there would not be a need to talk about the finer points of why one should use one approach over another. Fourth, without the large number of users making Red Hat Linux do things we could never have imagined, there wouldn’t be a need to document corner cases, provide advice about what not to do, and come up with better ways of describing what users should do, and why. Finally, without Red Hat’s commitment to use its own software in the ways that we recommend it to customers, we would not have found the hundreds of minor errors or omissions in our own documentation that users were too polite (or too lazy) to report to us.

In a sense, therefore, this book is to Linux documentation what Red Hat Linux is to all open-source software: a collection, packaged and organized for easy use, necessarily limited but not necessarily limiting, and then rigorously tested until we are satisfied with the consistency of the product. With Red Hat Linux, you have the best Linux distribution we know how to make. With this Administrator’s Guide, you will know how to make Red Hat Linux the best distribution for you.

Michael Tiemann
CTO, Red Hat