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There is a saying that some people are too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work. Distributed UNIX System Administration: Team Procedures for the Enterprise is a book that parallels that saying.
The book is, in fact, two books. The first nine of the book's eleven chapters deal with UNIX fundamentals. The basics of file and block structure, shells, scheduling, processes, security, and more are discussed. Although Wetsch does give a good overview of these topics, it is hard to justify spending almost $50 for those topics alone, when similar information is available for free on the Internet. If you do not want to spend a lot of money, check out the UNIX FAQ for answers to nearly every standard UNIX question. Also, subscribing to the Usenet comp.unix.questions newsgroup is another good, inexpensive way to become well informed about UNIX.
The final two chapters of the book detail a program Wetsch wrote called SAmatrix. SAmatrix is an expert analysis tool designed to manage systems with the goal of bringing order, reliability, and exception reporting to distributed systems. The outgrowth of SAmatrix is an Enterprise System Assessment that accesses an organization's environment and determines if the organization is at risk, and if so, what action to take.
SAmatrix breaks down systems into five modules: software, hardware, network, security, and operations. Within the program, there are about a hundred questions. After answering all of the questions, the program provides module risk assessments and levels of risk.
Although SAmatrix has a lot of potential, its problem is that currently, it is too light of a program to do anything meaningful for complex environments. Because it realistically cannot be customized or its entries weighted, the program is hardly usable. As an example, the fact that you cannot weigh the SAmatrix entry of fewer than six major system crashes per year is a problem, because six major crashes can be catastrophic for some environments (factory floor, hospitals, and so on) or a minor inconvenience for others (library, home use, and so forth). The main issue is that systems management is a complex science. Taming such a beast requires rather advanced tools, not the type that you will find limited to only two chapters in a $49.95 book.
-- Ben Rothke