During the past decade, Linux has become a widely used platform, being installed on a wide range of devices, from smartphones to corporate servers. The complexity of Linux distributions and the number of distributions have increased along with the installed base of Linux. A book that presents a consistent view of multiple distributions, the technology used therein, as well as uses case scenarios has long been needed.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive description of the installation and configuration of Linux platforms. The author groups the 35 chapters of the book into three parts, and organizes the presentation around common scenarios of setting up Linux servers for small office and home office environments.

The first part, “The Linux File Server Project,” starts with an introduction to networking, including network troubleshooting, and presents the configuration of two network services: dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) servers, and Samba-based file servers for Windows clients. A discussion of Linux wireless networking concludes the first part of the book.

The second part, “The Linux Web Site Project,” first shows readers how to set up Linux firewalls using the “iptables” package. It then describes how to set up servers that support the following protocols and services: file transfer protocol (FTP), XINETD (the Internet super daemon), OpenSSH (secure remote shell and file transfer), domain name system (DNS), the Apache Web server, the sendmail mail server, and the network time protocol (NTP) for time synchronization. Part 2 also includes an overview of system and network monitoring tools.

Part 3, “Advanced Topics,” presents two storage management techniques, and then covers disk usage management with quotas, file sharing with the network file system (NFS), Web access control with Squid, centralized logins with lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) and the network information service (NIS), MySQL databases, and Linux virtual private networks (VPNs).

The breadth of the topics covered in the book is adequate, the presentation is clear, and the author addresses both the theoretical and practical aspects of the subjects covered. However, the generality of the presentation could have been better. Given the nonuniformity of graphical user interface (GUI) configuration tools across the Linux distributions, the author chose to describe the tasks in terms of command-line tools. This works for the setup of most, but not all, open source software. Specifically, configuring a Linux-based platform involves, in addition to tools, configuration files, some of which are specific to a Linux distribution. Throughout the book, the author uses the Fedora Linux distribution, and does not indicate that other distributions may use different configuration files. For example, on page 46, the author references the file /etc/sysconfig/network, which does not exist in some widely used Linux distributions such as SUSE Linux and Debian Linux. Similarly, on page 37, the distribution-specific directory /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts is referenced. Additionally, in a few places, the presentation is not polished. For example, the following clumsy statement can be found on page 17: “an Internet Protocol (IP) address ... helps uniquely identify a user of the system.”

Overall, this book is a practical, readable, comprehensive guide to installing Linux and setting up Linux services, and will be useful to experienced information technology (IT) professionals.