Windows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals Review

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Windows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals ReviewI have never written a review for a book before, guess I'm just too busy or lazy (not sure which), but I just had to write something about this book. I would give it a 6th star if I could. Yes the book and topics covered are just that good! I first heard about this book through an article in Windows IT Pro magazine, another must have for system administrators. Once I read that article, I knew this book was a must have.
I am almost finished with this book and I have to say that "It has changed the way I look at and deal with Windows and Active Directory management!" The book is a great blend of technical knowledge and solutions to "Real World" issues that system and network administrators face every day. This book is helping me to reshape our entire infrastructure into a more manageable and productive environment. I thank you, my co-workers thank you, and my users thank you! If you buy this book and read through the concepts, implement the ideas that work best for you, your job is going to be so much easier and your users are going to be so much happier.
The book is massive and could be overwhelming at first look, but once you start reading into the content and concepts you start to see windows and active directory management in a new light. Each chapter builds on the previous, and Dan does a great job of making complex subjects easier to tackle (For example: How do I best organize my Active Directory in a logical easy manner?). Going through the book you get the distinct impression that Dan Holme has been in your shoes dealing with typical Active Directory issues for years and is pouring out all his real world experience onto the pages, it's almost like he is right there with you. You could spend 100 times the amount of the book on a consultant and still not get the same value and knowledge this book is going to give you!
Buy this book, in fact buy 2 and give one to a friend.Windows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals OverviewGet the comprehensive, essential resource for improving Windows administrator productivity. This book delivers solutions to the common issues Windows administrators face every day. Unlike other administrator resources available that cover features and functionality of Windows Server and the Windows client operating system, this unique guide provides the tools that help you do more with less and make the most of your time. Based on a popular talk that author Dan Holme gives at conferences throughout the world, this book walks you through the process of selecting your tools, configuring your work environment, and incorporating scripts and third-party utilities into your administrative toolkit. You ll even learn how to customize and automate solutions to meet the needs of your unique Windows-based environment. Covering Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP, and Windows VistaTM, this book helps you manage your environment from end to end. The companion CD includes a fully searchable eBook, tools, and other essential job resources.
Key Book Benefits
Brings together tools and practical advice providing solutions to a wide variety of administration problems
Provides comprehensive coverage focusing on manageability, security, provisioning, and role-based management
Delivers insights from a leading expert on Windows management and productivity
Features a CD with a fully searchable eBook, tools, and essential resources

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VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed: Using VBScript, WMI, and ADSI to Automate Windows Administration Review

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VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed: Using VBScript, WMI, and ADSI to Automate Windows Administration ReviewI found this book to be very helpful and practical with the examples given in the book. The examples have come in useful for me for basic systems administration in my Windows Server 2003 network with Active Directory. The author breaks down the example codes line by line and explains what is going on, which I found to be very helpful.
one thing I did not like was that some times the author purposely put mistakes in the code without initially telling you. Then towards the end of the section, he will ask you why the code did not work and will tell you what went wrong and why. He doesn't do this all the time, but a few times. It made me second guess myself and thought that the publisher had bad typos in the code, something familiarly seen in a lot of programming books. Good learning experience, I suppose.
Even if you are a beginner programmer wanting to learn VBscripting, I think you would be able to get the gist of VBscript by copying the examples in the book and tweaking them for your needs. This is my first VBscript book and it's definitely a keeper for me. Highly recommended!VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed: Using VBScript, WMI, and ADSI to Automate Windows Administration OverviewIf you're a Windows administrator, scripting expertise can liberate you from boring, repetitive work–so you can take on the sophisticated, high-value projects you really want. Top scripting guru Don Jones has written the definitive administrator's guide to getting results with Microsoft's key scripting technologies: VBScript, WMI, and ADSI. Jones draws on his unsurpassed experience training Windows administrators in conferences, classes, and from his enormously popular site, ScriptingAnswers.com. You'll learn how to use VBScript, WMI, and ADSI to gain administrative control over nearly every aspect of every recent Windows server or client, including Windows Server 2003, Vista, XP, 2000, and NT. As you gain experience, Jones introduces more advanced techniques, ranging from modular scripting and script encryption to integrating VBScript with HTML code. Jones concludes with a full section of ready-to-run, real-world examples–from logon/logoff scripts to automated domain and network administration, from querying WMI to creating Active Directory groups. Every script is explained line-by-line, with challenging techniques described in even greater detail.Detailed information on how to…Decide what you can script: a framework for getting started fastUnderstand how scripts are designed, assembled, and runMaster VBScript from start to finish: functions, I/O, data manipulation, program flow, and much moreUse scripting objects for tasks ranging from retrieving network information to mapping drivesUtilize FileSystemObject to manipulate the Windows filesystemWrite ADSI scripts to manipulate any directory service your company uses, from Active Directory to Novell NDSModify domain information, users, groups, and policiesQuery WMI information–from basic to advancedPlan for errors, and test and debug your scriptsBuild your own "resource kit" of reusable script componentsON THE WEB:Download all examples and source code presented in this book from ScriptingAnswers.com, where you'll also be able to post follow-up questions directly to the author in a moderated, active community.Introduction 1Part I: Introduction to Windows Administrative Scripting 11Chapter 1: Scripting Concepts and Terminology 13Chapter 2: Running Scripts 21Chapter 3: The Components of a Script 39Chapter 4: Designing a Script 55Part II: VBScript Tutorial 73Chapter 5: Functions, Objects, Variables, and More 75Chapter 6: Input and Output 101Chapter 7: Manipulating Numbers 115Chapter 8: Manipulating Strings 129Chapter 9: Manipulating Other Types of Data 145Chapter 10: Controlling the Flow of Execution 155Chapter 11: Built-In Scripting Objects 173Chapter 12: Working with the File System 193Chapter 13: Putting It All Together: Creating Your First Script from Scratch 219Part III: Windows Management Instrumentation and Active Directory Services Interface 245Chapter 14: Working with ADSI Providers 247Chapter 15: Manipulating Domains 257Chapter 16: Manipulating Users and Groups 271Chapter 17: Understanding WMI 283Chapter 18: Querying Basic WMI Information 299Chapter 19: Querying Complex WMI Information 317Chapter 20: Putting It All Together: Your First WMI/ADSI Script 335Chapter 21: Testing and Debugging WMI and ADSI Queries 357Part IV: Advanced Scripting Techniques 371Chapter 22: Modular Script Programming 373Chapter 23: Scripts Packaging and Protection 389Chapter 24: Scripting Security 399Chapter 25: Introduction to HTML Applications 409Chapter 26: Debugging Tips, Tools, and Techniques 421Part V: Ready-to-Run Examples 437Chapter 27: Logon and Logoff Scripts 439Chapter 28: Windows and Domain Administration Scripts 455Chapter 29: Network Administration Scripts 481Chapter 30: WMI and ADSI Scripts 497Appendix 509Index 523.

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Using SANs and NAS Review

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Using SANs and NAS ReviewIf you are looking for an overview of SAN and NAS that is both technically informative and equitable, this is the book for you. I bought it to better understand NAS-SAN convergence trends and it was invaluable for that purpose.
As with most O'Reilly books, it doesn't underestimate the reader, yet still manages to cover all the bases from basic to bread-and-butter, and beyond. The prose style is casual but very precise and always clear.
I want to stress what an earlier reviewer pointed out: it is especially strong on real world backup and restore issues...which is MUCH more important and complex than is initially apparent.
If you are tasked with building a real-world storage infrastructure: read this book first. BTW, because my local B&N was out-of-stock, I paid extra to have [Amazon.com] expedite this slim volume, (grumbling all the way), and ended up happy as a clam about it. Best IT book investment I ever made.Using SANs and NAS Overview
Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and modern data centers have extremely demanding requirements for size, speed, and reliability. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) allow organizations to manage and back up huge file systems quickly, thereby keeping their lifeblood flowing. W. Curtis Preston's insightful book takes you through the ins and outs of building and managing large data centers using SANs and NAS.

As a network administrator you're aware that multi-terabyte data stores are common and petabyte data stores are starting to appear. Given this much data, how do you ensure that it is available all the time, that access times and throughput are reasonable, and that the data can be backed up and restored in a timely manner?SANs and NAS provide solutions that help you work through these problems, with special attention to the difficulty of backing up huge data stores.

This book explains the similarities and differences of SANs and NAS to help you determine which, or both, of these complementing technologies are appropriate for your network. Using SANs, for instance, is a way to share multiple devices (tape drives and disk drives) for storage, while NAS is a means for centrally storing files so they can be shared. Preston exams each technology with a vendor neutral approach, starting with the building blocks of a SAN and how they can be assembled for effective storage solutions. He covers day-to-day management and backup and recovery for both SANs and NAS in detail.

Whether you're a seasoned storage administrator or a network administrator charged with taking on this role, you'll find all the information you need to make informed architecture and data management decisions.The book fans out to explore technologies such as RAID and other forms of monitoring that will help complement your data center.With an eye on the future, other technologies that might affect the architecture and management of the data center are explored.This is sure to be an essential volume in any network administrator's or storage administrator's library.


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The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Review

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The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition ReviewGood sysadmins know the technical details. They can resurrect a dead server, understand the intricacies of sendmail or the Windows registry, and recite all of the types of DNS records by heart. They own copies of the UNIX System Administration Handbook and refer to them regularly. They are good sysadmins, and will contribute solidly at an intermediate level.
Great sysadmins know all of that and what is in this book. They are the ones who go on to become the senior sysadmins and consultants, have fabulous careers, and are respected by their bosses, co-workers, and customers.
There is much more to a technical job than simply the technical skills. Don't buy this book to learn how to run a system or you will be disappointed. Do, however, buy it to learn how to be an effective professional systems administrator.
It is also useful for a manager of sysadmins who is either non-technical, or has never been a sysadmin himself, as it is a good introduction to the issues and concerns that sysadmins need to face.
Limoncelli and Hogan cover many topics, including:
- Trouble ticket systems
- Desktops and Servers (how they're the same, differ, etc.)
- Administrative networks (why bother?)
- Requirements (gathering, tracking, etc.)
- Standards and centralization of services
- How to do debugging (not "you see this problem, do this" but rather learning the process of doing good debugging)
- Fix things once, not over and over again
- Security policies (including management and organizational issues for a variety of organizational profiles)
- Disaster Recovery (again, not how to backup data, but why you'd want to, legal issues, etc.)
- Systems Administration Ethics
- Change management and revision control
- Maintenance windows: what they are and why they're good for both you and your users
- Centralization versus Decentralization
- Helpdesks: sizing, scope, processes, escalation, etc.
- Data centers (many physical facility concerns that sysadmins don't often think of, including how to move a datacenter)
- Managing non-OS software (commercial and free)
They will help you answer questions like
- Does server hardware really cost more? Do we go with a few expensive servers or many cheap ones?
- What does "redundancy" actually mean?
- Why would we spend money on backups? There's never been an outage...
- What do I do when asked to do something illegal?
- How do I communicate and schedule large system changes?
- How do I do a safe server upgrade?
- They want to decentralize the sysadmin group -- what do we do?
- How do we move our datacenter?
- What sort of policy issues are there with email?
- How do I deal with my customers abusing printers?
- What do we have to worry about if we're implementing remote access (e.g. dialup modem banks) for our users?
Finally, they close with an entire section on Management:
- How to deal with cost centers, management chains, hiring, customer support, and outsourcing.
- How to manage your customers perceptions and your team's visibility
- How to manage your own happiness (time management, communication, professional development, managing your manager, etc.)
- How to be a technical manager, how to work with non-technical managers, manage your own career growth, etc.
- How to hire good sysadmins, recruiting, interviewing, soft skills, technical skills, employee retention, etc.
- The special concerns around how to fire sysadmins (often problematic, given their higher level of access)
They even have a chapter for non-technical managers who are in charge of sysadmins (this entire book would be very useful to give to a non-technical manager who doesn't really 'get it'.)
The book closes with three appendixes:
A. The Many Role of a System Administrator
B. What to Do When...
C. Acronyms
Appendix B is particularly useful, answering a wide variety of questions with solid, practical answers.
The skills and concepts in this book are the make-or-break in many careers. They turn you from just another sysadmin into a star performer, sensitive to your customers and the business, able to interact with a wide spectrum of people.The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Overview
The first edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration introduced a generation of system and network administrators to a modern IT methodology. Whether you use Linux, Unix, or Windows, this newly revised edition describes the essential practices previously handed down only from mentor to protégé. This wonderfully lucid, often funny cornucopia of information introduces beginners to advanced frameworks valuable for their entire career, yet is structured to help even the most advanced experts through difficult projects.

The book's four major sections build your knowledge with the foundational elements of system administration. These sections guide you through better techniques for upgrades and change management, catalog best practices for IT services, and explore various management topics. Chapters are divided into The Basics and The Icing. When you get the Basics right it makes every other aspect of the job easier--such as automating the right things first. The Icing sections contain all the powerful things that can be done on top of the basics to wow customers and managers.

Inside, you'll find advice on topics such as

The key elements your networks and systems need in order to make all other services run better
Building and running reliable, scalable services, including web, storage, email, printing, and remote access
Creating and enforcing security policies
Upgrading multiple hosts at one time without creating havoc
Planning for and performing flawless scheduled maintenance windows
Managing superior helpdesks and customer care
Avoiding the "temporary fix" trap
Building data centers that improve server uptime
Designing networks for speed and reliability
Web scaling and security issues
Why building a backup system isn't about backups
Monitoring what you have and predicting what you will need
How technically oriented workers can maintain their job's technical focus (and avoid an unwanted management role)
Technical management issues, including morale, organization building, coaching, and maintaining positive visibility
Personal skill techniques, including secrets for getting more done each day, ethical dilemmas, managing your boss, and loving your job
System administration salary negotiation

It's no wonder the first edition received Usenix SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award!

This eagerly anticipated second edition updates this time-proven classic:

Chapters reordered for easier navigation
Thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback
Plus three entirely new chapters: Web Services, Data Storage, and Documentation


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Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools Review

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Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools ReviewThis is basically a book about intrusion detection using all open source tools. It starts with an introductory chapter that explains the problem of defining an intrusion and why it is becoming more and more of a problem. It follows up with a chapter on network traffic analysis including packet sniffing and using tcpdump and ethereal. Then comes the meat of the text - installing Snort. Of course to really understand how to use Snort you have to understand how attacks occur and the common methods used. The authors provide a really nice chapter on this subject. After that come five chapters on configuring, deploying, and managing Snort rules, intrusion prevention strategies, and tuning. Once Snort is up and running the authors examine the use of ACID and SnortCenter as Snort IDS management consoles. Either of these products drastically decreases the burden of analyzing what has happened and is happening on the intrusion detection forefront. The book ends with additional tools for Snort IDS management and implementation strategies for high-bandwidth situations.
There are other very good books on Snort but one of the things that makes this one particularly valuable is that it also looks at other open source tools and provides a good basic background on intrusion detection theory. Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools is highly recommended for those in charge of intrusion detection and prevention in a network environment and planning to implement a system their self.Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools Overview
Intrusion detection is not for the faint at heart. But, if you are a network administrator chances are you're under increasing pressure to ensure that mission-critical systems are safe--in fact impenetrable--from malicious code, buffer overflows, stealth port scans, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, CGI attacks, and other network intruders.

Designing a reliable way to detect intruders before they get in is a vital but daunting challenge. Because of this, a plethora of complex, sophisticated, and pricy software solutions are now available. In terms of raw power and features, SNORT, the most commonly used Open Source Intrusion Detection System, (IDS) has begun to eclipse many expensive proprietary IDSes. In terms of documentation or ease of use, however, SNORT can seem overwhelming. Which output plugin to use?How do you to email alerts to yourself? Most importantly, how do you sort through the immense amount of information Snort makes available to you?

Many intrusion detection books are long on theory but short on specifics and practical examples. Not Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools.This new book is a thorough, exceptionally practical guide to managing network security using Snort 2.1 (the latest release) and dozens of other high-quality open source other open source intrusion detection programs.

Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools covers reliable methods for detecting network intruders, from using simple packet sniffers to more sophisticated IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems) applications and the GUI interfaces for managing them. A comprehensive but concise guide for monitoring illegal entry attempts, this invaluable new book explains how to shut down and secure workstations, servers, firewalls, routers, sensors and other network devices.

Step-by-step instructions are provided to quickly get up and running with Snort. Each chapter includes links for the programs discussed, and additional links at the end of the book give administrators access to numerous web sites for additional information and instructional material that will satisfy even the most serious security enthusiasts.

Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools maps out a proactive--and effective--approach to keeping your systems safe from attack.


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