Professional Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

What is this book about?

Professional Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is a complete professional guide to setting up, configuring, and deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the corporate production environment. The book focuses on Enterprise Server and Advanced Server features, including the key areas of high availability with the Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Control Center, and Red Hat Enterprise applications such as the Content Management System and portal server. Other key unique features include kernel tuning for various performance profiles; advanced Apache configuration; Tux installation/maintenance; building high-performance FTP servers; building high-performance mail servers (which means replacing Sendmail); Mailing list management; how to efficiently add, remove, or modify 100 users at the same time; and a discussion of disk quota management and monitoring.

What does this book cover?

The key features of the book include the following:

• How to install and setup RHEL 3
• How to deploy RHEL 3 in production environment
• How to manage an RHEL system using Perl and shell scripting
• Advanced administration tools
• How to use Red Hat network service
• Details on installation and setup of security tools
• Ability to use and deploy High Availability solutions provided with RHEL 3
• Performance tuning
• How to use monitoring tools
• Ability to use RHEL to provide scalable infrastructure solutions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is a fully supported, robust, and easily managed system for enterprise use. This book offers a complete professional guide to setting, configuring, and deploying RHEL 3 AS (Advanced Server), ES (Enterprise Server), and WS (Workstation) editions in the corporate production department.

You will begin with a complete overview and setup instructions for RHEL 3, then examine the Red Hat Network, improvements in the filesystem, and storage management, including ACL (Access Control List), RAID, and LVM. You will move on through High Availability products, an overview of Web, Email and Directory services, printing with CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) software, and file sharing with SAMBA and NFS. Finally, you’ll study security issues, scripting, and online resources for RHEL 3.

What you will learn from this book

• How to implement and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for desktop, production servers, and mission-critical applications
• Details of Red Hat Enterprise products, including Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Content Management System, and Red Hat Portal Server.
• Kernel tuning for various performance profiles
• Basic and advanced security policies and methods of implementation
• How to use the Red Hat Network to keep your system updated
• Efficient ways to add, remove, or modify dozens or hundreds of users simultaneously

Who this book is for

This book is for system administrators who need to deploy and administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 systems efficiently and securely. You should have a basic understanding of Linux/Unix operating systems and preferably, some hands-on experience with Red Hat Linux.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Kapil Sharma developed a keen interest in Linux and open source technology in the mid-90s and has been working on various Unix systems and Internet Security technologies for more than 10 years. He is a postgraduate in business computing and has deployed many Unix, high-availability, clustering, and Internet security projects. He is a Sun certified system administrator (SCSA) and Sun certified network administrator (SCNA). He is also actively involved in the open source community and has contributed many technical articles on system and network security. He enjoys working on new challenges in Internet security, Internet architecture design, and various Unix flavors. He also fancies technical writing and thereby sharing his knowledge with the community. He maintains a consulting company that provides Unix and Internet security solutions, and a Web site with loads of security resources at www.linux4biz.net.

Mohammed J. Kabir is CEO and founder of EVOKNOW, Inc. His company (www.evoknow.com) develops software using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), Java, and C++. It specializes in custom software development and offers security consulting services to many companies around the globe.
When he is not busy managing software projects or writing books, Kabir enjoys riding mountain bikes and watching sci-fi movies. Kabir studied computer engineering at California State University, Sacramento, and is also the author of Apache Server 2 Bible, Apache Server Administrator's Handbook, and Red Hat Server 8. You can contact Kabir via email at kabir@evoknow.com.

Peter Norton has been working with Unix and Linux for over a decade. He has worked at companies large and small solving problems with Linux. He is an officer of the New York Linux Users group, and can be found on the nylug-talk mailing list. He currently works for a large company in New York City. He's a vegetarian who enjoys playing capoeira angola, drinking German beer, learning Portuguese, indoor rock climbing, and sunshine.

Nathan A. Good is a software engineer, author, and all-around computer nerd living in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. His computer expertise can best be described as "jack of all trades, master of none." He has been administering and using Red Hat Linux boxes since RH 5, and has used many other distributions as well. He has also administered Sun, HP-UX, and AIX servers, and Windows servers and PCs.
Nathan has done programming in Java, Perl, PHP, C, C# and ASP.NET, and Bash shell scripting. He's also worked with Delphi, but he doesn't tell anyone.

Tony Steidler-Dennison is a freelance PHP/MySQL developer and longtime Red Hat Linux user. His coding credits encompass a wide range of applications, including robotic telescope control software, online personal information management tools, and online job site spidering. As an author, he was the original editor of "Lockernome's Penguin Shell" newsletter and contributes frequently to Linux Journal. He's also dabbled in the political arena, serving as the principal PHP/MySQL developer for the Wesley Clark for President campaign in 2003-2004.