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Fedora Linux servers with systemd
Petersen R., surfing turtle press, Alameda, CA, 2014. 504 pp. Type: Book (978-1-936280-83-4)
Date Reviewed: Nov 13 2015

The systemd initialization mechanism has become widely used on Linux servers over the past two years, and this is one of the few books that offers insight into its operation. If you get the second printing, ignore the sentence on the back that tells you it covers Fedora Linux 20; it actually covers Fedora Linux 21. That version was released some time ago, but most of the book’s content is applicable to the subsequent release; the outstanding difference is that you will have to use dnf instead of yum as the software maintenance utility.

The book is organized into five parts. In the first of these, there is an introductory chapter in which readers are advised to install a workstation version of Fedora Linux, or they can install a server version and then retrofit a workstation group.

In the second chapter, screen shots illustrate how applications found on the GNOME desktop can be used for configuring network connections and installing software packages. Configuration for the sudo administrative access tool is also discussed.

Chapter 3 covers systemd. A brief introduction describes how it is able to start multiple processes in simultaneity through the use of sockets; this is followed by a description of configuration file syntax and unit types. The set of service and other directives covered would probably equip a reader to code a simple start script for a custom application.

In chapter 4, readers will find a comprehensive description of firewall management using the graphical firewall-config tool for the FirewallD daemon. Instructions are included for stopping the firewalld service so that the old system-config-firewall tool can be used.

Part 2 (“Internet Servers”) begins with a chapter about mail servers. It describes configuration files used for Postfix, Sendmail, and Dovecot; sufficient information is provided for setting up basic instances of each.

A short “FTP” chapter illustrates the characteristics and configuration files for both the very secure file transfer protocol (FTP) Server and the ProFTP Daemon. This is followed by a “Web Servers” chapter in which the main configuration options for Apache are presented. It is suggested that basic configuration might be undertaken using the system-config-httpd tool. Common gateway interface (CGI) and PHP scripts are mentioned together with server-side include (SSI) directives, but no examples are shown.

The final chapter in Part 2, “News and Database Servers,” contains a couple of pages about MariaDB configuration and usage. Trust me, this is not the place to look if you are serious about using a database server.

Part 3 (“Shared Resources”) has, as one might expect, chapters about configuring common Unix printing system (CUPS) print services, NFS filesystems, and Samba facilities for accessing Windows resources. It also has a “Distributed File Systems” chapter that shows how the Corosync cluster engine and the Pacemaker cluster resource manager can be used to manage a GFS2 global filesystem--not something you will find in other books of this type!

Part 4 (“Network Support”) has a short chapter illustrating how the Squid proxy server can be used both for gateway purposes and as a caching server. This is followed by a longer chapter that explores Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) and version 6 (IPv6) addressing schemes, and shows how the BIND nameserver software can be configured for both schemes. The coverage is quite detailed and includes some instructions for using the DNSSEC security extensions.

Part 4 ends with a chapter about IPv6 autoconfiguration and DHCP server configuration. The author points out that DHCP servers are now able to dynamically update BIND domain name system (DNS) server zone configuration files using shared transaction signature (TSIG) keys.

In the final part, “Administrative Topics,” there is a short chapter that deals with basic system administration (configuration directories, system logs, cron operations, and GRUB options). This is followed by another short chapter in which system-wide and individual files for initializing shell variables are described.

The last chapter (“Administering TCP/IP Networks”) covers network addressing, interface management, and route establishment in some detail. The usage of some network diagnostic tools is also illustrated.

You won’t find much in this book about disk partitioning, mirroring schemes, or kernel compilation, but you will get a reasonable introduction to the sorts of server applications that can be supported on recent Fedora Linux systems.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  G. K. Jenkins Review #: CR143951 (1601-0017)
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