TCP/IP Network Administration .

By Craig Hunt; ISBN 1-56592-322-7, 630 pages.
Second Edition, December 1997.

All of us who use a UNIX desktop system - engineers, educators, scientists, and business people - have second careers as UNIX system administrators. Networking these computers gives us new tasks as network administrators.

Network administration and system administration are two different jobs. System administration tasks such as adding users and doing backups are isolated to one independent computer system. Not so with network administration. Once you place your computer on a network, it interacts with many other systems. The way you do network administration tasks has effects, good and bad, not only on your system but on other systems on the network. A sound understanding of basic network administration benefits everyone.

Networking computers dramatically enhances their ability to communicate - and most computers are used more for communication than computation. Many mainframes and supercomputers are busy crunching the numbers for business and science, but the number of such systems pales in comparison to the millions of systems busy moving mail to a remote colleague or retrieving information from a remote repository. Further, when you think of the hundreds of millions of desktop systems that are used primarily for preparing documents to communicate ideas from one person to another, it is easy to see why most computers can be viewed as communications devices.

The positive impact of computer communications increases with the number and type of computers that participate in the network. One of the greatbenefits of TCP/IP is that it provides interoperable communications between all types of hardware and all kinds of operating systems.

This book is a practical, step-by-step guide to configuring and managing TCP/IP networking software on UNIX computer systems. TCP/IP is the software package that dominates UNIX data communications. It is the leading communications software for UNIX local area networks and enterprise intranets, and for the foundation of the worldwide Internet.

The name "TCP/IP" refers to an entire suite of data communications protocols. The suite gets its name from two of the protocols that belong to it: the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. Although there are many other protocols in the suite, TCP and IP are certainly two of the most important.

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