How This Book Is Organized

The chapters and appendixes in this book are grouped by topic into five parts. The following sections give you a brief description of each of the book’s parts.

Part I: Essential Information

This part of the book contains basic information about working with Red Hat Linux 8.0. The topics include installation, the boot process, shutdown, boot loaders (both LILO and GRUB), the file system, and gathering essential system information. Whether you are new to Linux or upgrading from a previous version of Red Hat Linux, the information in this section will explain basic concepts and introduce new features exclusive to Red Hat Linux 8.0.

Part II: Basic System Administration

Part II contains information needed by new system administrators or those who have not worked on a Red Hat Linux system before, as well as information about new administrative features in Red Hat Linux 8.0. In this section, you will find chapters on system configuration, user and group management, printers, automated task scheduling, RAID arrays, the X Window System, and kernel management.

Part III: Network Administration

Part III introduces the many elements of network management. In this part, you will find chapters on network configuration and scripting, DHCP, BIND, and LDAP, as well as critical user services like email, the Apache Web server, and NFS/Samba file sharing. Red Hat Linux 8.0 ships with all these services, and these chapters show how to configure each service to suit your network and organizational needs.

Part IV: Security

Every system administrator is concerned about security, no matter how small the system. As cracker sophistication increases, new tools are devised to keep systems safe and secure. This section of the book contains chapters introducing the most powerful security tools, including firewalls, Kerberos 5, SSH, PAM, and Tripwire.

Part V: Appendixes

This part of the book contains useful reference information that will help you administer your Red Hat system. Here, you will find information on installing Red Hat Linux 8.0, how to work with rescue mode, and how to define general parameters and modules useful when working with Red Hat Linux.