The Linux Network Administrators' Guide

Olaf Kirch, <okir@monad.swb.de>
Linux Documentation Project


18. Aug. 1994
Release 1.0



Welcome to the public release of the new Linux Network Administrators'
Guide! After one year of work in (well, almost) seclusion, I'm proud
to present you a completely revised, greatly improved and expanded
Networking Guide.


1. What's In It?

The new NAG is an almost complete rewrite of the version I released
almost exactly one year ago. It features several new chapters,
including the setup of SLIP, PPP, and NIS. It also has a complete
sendmail chapter now, written by Vince Skahan.

The NAG is written mainly for networking rookies (as I have been when
I started this project almost two years ago), but I hope it will be
useful to more experienced networkers alike. It explains everything in
pretty much detail, beginning with the basics of networking and slowly
working its way up to the configuration of mail and news, covering
both the setup of TCP/IP-based services and UUCP. The following list
shows the table of contents:

+ Preface

+ Introduction to Networking

+ Issues of TCP/IP Networking

+ Configuring the Networking Hardware

+ Setting up the Serial Hardware

+ Configuring TCP/IP Networking

+ Name Service and Resolver Configuraton

+ Serial Line IP

+ The Point-to-Point Protocol

+ Various Network Applications

+ The Network Information System

+ The Network File System

+ Managing Taylor UUCP

+ Electronic Mail

+ Getting smail Up and Running

+ Sendmail+IDA

+ Netnews

+ C News

+ A Description of NNTP

+ Newsreader Configuration

+ Glossary

+ Annotated Bibliography

The level of detail comes at a certain cost, which is the size of the
book. When running it through LaTeX, it comes out at around 350 pages
at the moment, counting table of contents, glossary, and index. This
is quite a bit. I hope you'll enjoy it nevertheless.


2. With a little help...

The NAG wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the involvement
of O'Reilly and Associates in this project, who are going to publish
the Official Printed Version of the NAG some time later this year.
Since December 1993, I've been working with Andy Oram at O'Reilly who
read everything I wrote, and sent me countless reviews, so much of the
quality in this book is actually due to him.

Still, the NAG will remain freely distributable under the Linux Docu-
mentation Project's License, just the way the previous release was.
Thus, no-one will be shut off; rather, you will be able to choose
between the online version and a high-quality printed version.


3. Obtaining the NAG

The NAG is available both as LaTeX source, and preformatted in several
ways. The primary FTP sites are

sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/docs/LDP
tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/docs/LDP

The following packages are available:

nag-1.0.tar.gz This file contains the LaTeX source of the NAG. I've
tried to make it as portable as possible, so I do hope it will
compile cleanly on most LaTeX installations. Some nuances of the
DVI and Postscript output can be controlled by a configuration
file which allows you, among other things, to select a tighter
printing which reduces the size of the printed book by almost 100
pages. For details, please refer to the installation notes in
that archive.

nag-dvi-1.0.tar.gz This file contains the preformatted DVI output of
the NAG, suitable for printing on US Letter paper. All figures in
the NAG are done using using xfig, from which I generated
epic/eepic output for the DVI version. The eepic macros rely on
some LaTeX \special's that some DVI printer drivers may not have
implemented. If you don't see any figures on your printout, or
get pages full of error messages about \special's not supported
while printing the NAG, your best option may be this: Convert the
DVI file to PostScript and print the offending pages from using
ghostcsript.

nag-ps-1.0.tar.gz This file contains the preformatted PostScript out-
put of the NAG, again suitable for printing on Letter Paper. This
should be almost painless to use.

nag-ascii-1.0.tar.gz This is the ASCII version, which is provided for
the benefit of those without the disk space or printer capabili-
ties to handle a full TeX or ghostcript installation. As things
go with ASCII, the output is not very high quality, will eat hor-
rendous amounts of paper when actually printing it (close to 400
pages), and doesn't have any figures (anybody who is willing to
try his or her hand on ASCII art is very welcome).

All these files are gzipped tar archives.


4. Feedback

If you have complaints, suggestions, fixes, or questions, please mail
me at the address given above. However, let me say a word about `bug'
reporting: if you have fixes to the NAG itself, please don't use ref-
erences like `page 87, second paragraph', but rather give me a section
number, or even a detailed description like `In the mount section of
the NFS chapter'. Although I may find the sentence you refer to when
you use page numbers, there's no guarantee the mistake you spotted is
anywhere close to that page on my printed copy.

I hope I didn't forget anything,
Enjoy
Olaf Kirch