Networking for Systems Administrators

by Michael W. Lucas

Stop waiting for the network team! If basic TCP/IP was hard, network administrators couldn’t do it. Servers give sysadmins a incredible visibility into the network—once they know how to unlock it. Most sysadmins don’t need to understand window scaling, or the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 echo requests, or other intricacies of the TCP/IP protocols. You need only enough to deploy your own applications and get easy support from the network team. This book teaches • How modern networks really work • The essentials of TCP/IP • The next-generation protocol, IPv6 • The right tools to diagnose network problems, and how to use them • Troubleshooting everything from the physical wire to DNS • How to see the traffic you send and receive • Connectivity testing • How to communicate with your network team to quickly resolve problems A systems administrator doesn’t need to know the innards of TCP/IP, but knowing enough to diagnose your own network issues transforms a good sysadmin into a great one.

Genres: Nonfiction, Computer Science, Technology, Technical, Computers, Software, Reference

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2015

About the author

Michael W. Lucas is the author of fifty-odd critically-acclaimed nonfiction books. As Michael Warren Lucas, he's written several novels.

Reviews

[Abhishek Jaisingh]

The book does a good job at explaining the things one expects from the title. Doesn't go into too much theoretical details and peculiarities and gives you a quick overview of various tools that are most useful in handling problems when things go wrong.

[Geoff]

I work in the field that this book covers and found it to be an excellent resource. It is mainly a refresher of the basics for me but as the author notes it's meant more for SysAdmins to use when working with Network Admins.

The author's writing style is humorous and engaging. All subjects are well explained and, in most cases, good examples provided with those subjects. I particularly liked his presentation on using tcpdump.

I highly recommend this work to anyone either entering into Systems/Network Administration as both a good intro and refresher. Five stars all around.

[John Doe]

great bridge between too technical network protocol details and system network management. its written in such an excellent style that complicated networking concepts could be understood in a very simple manner, like how each layer is build on a linux machine and how buildin tools interact with fundamental networking infrastructures, the NAT, ARP etc.

[José Luis]

Great book overall. It limits itself to interacting with the networking layers and explaining the different tools you can use to troubleshoot different things in different layers. There is a sprinkle of humor that fits really well.

[Christopher Pace]

Really well written introduction to many networking concepts, tailored to sysAdmins. Includes lots of practical ideas and wisdom

[Eric]

A wonderful book, just wished I would have found this years ago when I started my career as a SysAdmin. How it would have saved me from blaming the networking team for many cases. Glad I read it.

[Leland William]

This is a quick read and full of helpful ways to think about computer networking problems.

It's also well-written and funny, so that helps too :).

[Juraj Martinka]

Very good, short, and super-practical book.
A bunch of useful tools and techniques to apply at different network stack levels.
Recommended!

[richardphoto.jpg (Rich)]

A networking book with mushrooms on the cover, because mycelium makes mushrooms among the most networked organisms on the planet. Brilliant writing, funny, concise. Read it.

[Kevin]

Incredibly practical and gets you up and running with hands on network tools. Doesn’t waste space with unnecessary filler content. Highly recommend

[Leeroy]

It's hard to say how useful this book is/will be.
It assumes a very low level of pre-knowledge, so it is accessible, with the side-effect of being very basic at times.
Style was great, super-readable.

[Nils]

Great book for helping sysadmins better talk and work with Network admins. Smooth style and very effective way to impart useful info.

[Alex French]

I would like the companion version that goes into a lot more detail on individual topics, but this was an excellent broad overview, filling in gaps where I had no knowledge.

[David]

A must-read for devs

[Ivan Ng]

Knowledge that isn't presented dryly. With some jokes throughout, it wasn't a snore for a book like this.

[André Santos]

Insteresting book, helped me fill some gaps and servers as a nice introduction to networking.