Zadok's Book review by Tony Williams

Reviewer: Tony Williams, from Neutral Bay, NSW Australia
"Sheds light on the black art", February 13, 2002

I always thought configuring a Samba server for solid and secure operations was a black art until I started using NFS. My first NFS installation had security holes you could drive a truck through, fortunately it was two highly paranoid firewalls away from the internet.

If you are intent on having an NFS server in your network then you will need help. Who better to give it to you than the man who has been looking after the Linux NFS and automount code for several years. Zadok certainly knows his stuff.

The Craig Hunt Linux Library, the Sybex imprint that publishes this book, is quickly rising in my esteem. This is the second volume I've bought (the other was Auld's "Linux Apache Web Server Administration") and both have been absolute winners.

I most appreciate that it does not waste time with any unnecessary details about Linux or Unix but gets straight down to the topic at hand (in this case a marvellous description of NFS design and workings.) A good way to go since most of the people, myself included, who will buy this book already have a fair amount of Linux knowledge or will buy a volume that can afford the more basic topics more space.

Second is that it covers both the server and client side with enough detail. It doesn't talk down to you while at the same time it makes almost no assumptions about your level of NFS knowledge.

Third is that while it says "Linux" in the title, in just the same way that Auld's book on Apache can be used by any Apache owner (and that includes Macintosh OS X), this book is useful for anyone using NFS on a Unix or Unix derivative such as BSD, Solaris or Mac OS X. In fact one of the server and client configurations I performed with the help of this book was on my personal Mac OS X box. That doesn't deny that there are minor differences in some implementations, particularly with automount and status software but in my experience they have been minor.

If you intend to run NFS on a server then this book should be sitting beside the computer as you carefully check the configuration. I recommend this book to everyone, a "must buy."