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Linux Troubleshooting Bible

Christopher Negus and
Thomas Weeks
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.
10475 Crosspoint Boulevard,
Indianapolis , IN 46256
www.wiley.com

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 0-7645-6997-X

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Authors

Christopher Negus is the author of Red Hat Linux Bible (all editions), Linux Toys, and dozens of other books on Linux and UNIX systems. Chris began his career writing about UNIX systems at AT& T more than two decades ago. His work with AT& T included an 8-year run with Bell Laboratories and UNIX System Laboratories, where he worked directly with the developers of the UNIX System V operating system. Later, Chris followed the UNIX source code to Novell, Inc., in Utah, where he helped develop UnixWare documentation and wrote several books on UNIX and UnixWare.

Thomas ("Tweeks") Weeks holds a BS-EET/Telecom degree from Texas A& M, has worked for several large government and IT/security contractors in the positions of Test and Integration lab coordinator and general sysadmin, sysadmin technical trainer and course developer, as well as electrical and systems engineer. He has been working with Rackspace Managed Hosting since 1999 in the roles of Sys-Admin, Corporate Technical Trainer, and has acted as liaison between customer support/security/product/engineering departments. Tweeks has also been president of the San Antonio user group, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio (xcssa.org) since 1996.

Credits

Acquisitions Editor
Debra Williams Cauley

Development Editor
Sara Shlaer

Production Editor
Eric Newman

Technical Editor
François Caen

Contributing Author
Jesse Keating

Editorial Manager
Mary Beth Wakefield

Vice President & Executive Group Publisher
Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher
Bob Ipsen

Vice President and Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert

Executive Editorial Director
Mary Bednarek

Permissions Editor
Laura Moss

Media Development Specialist
Kit Malone

As always, I dedicate this book to my wife, Sheree.

-C.N.

To my loving and supporting wife, Teri, who likes firewalls, especially green ones. Without her, I would be an incomplete geek.

-T.W.

Acknowledgments

Chris Negus: With the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora Core and a rampant feeling that those using free Linux systems weren't going to get any official support if things went wrong, we wanted to get a Linux troubleshooting book out to you quickly. To that end, we asked a lot of people to work really hard in a short period of time.

I was thrilled when Thomas Weeks agreed to coauthor this book. His years of experience working with and training the people who support thousands of Red Hat Linux systems at Rackspace Managed Hosting (www.rackspace.com) have added incredible depth to the content of this book. I'd like to thank him for the long hours, late nights, and weekends he consumed to get this book out to you.

Getting Jesse Keating to write the chapter on upgrading and updating, as well as an appendix on Fedora software repositories, was another coup. As leader of the Fedora Legacy project, there is no better authority than Jesse on getting the critical software updates you need to continue to use free Red Hat Linux and Fedora distributions as reliable operating systems. My thanks to Jesse for the countless hours spent outside his day job to make this book a reality.

Special thanks go to François Caen (spidermaker.com), whose RHCE skills added a wonderful dimension to his technical editing of the book. Rounding out the writing team, Kate and Joe Merlino have shown the value of having technically savvy professional writers on a Linux book project. The Kate and Joe team had to work through large amounts of raw material from Thomas and myself, which I feel they did with great success.

As any Linux book should, I would like to acknowledge Linux kernel developers (kernel.org) and the GNU Project (gnu.org) as major contributors to Linux and the whole open source movement. Likewise, I would like to thank Red Hat, Inc., (www.redhat.com) and members of the Fedora Project (http://fedora.redhat.com) for producing high-quality Linux distributions.

I'd like to thank Debra Williams Cauley at Wiley for suggesting that I do this project, instead of just working on more Linux Toys (www.linuxtoys.net). Thanks to Sara Shlaer for keeping us on track with a tight schedule. Thanks to Margot Maley Hutchison at Waterside Productions for contracting the book with Wiley and the other writers on this project.

And finally, thanks to my wife, Sheree, for being my rock, and Caleb and Seth for being the best boys a dad could ask for.

Thomas Weeks: I am honored to have been asked by Chris to participate in this project. He's a great resource to the Linux community, and he and I have really come to know each other well during this frenzied project. Technical Editor François Caen and I used to work together at Rackspace Managed Hosting and have been good friends for years. Between our long hours of work during the early years at Rackspace, I would try to get his wife to let him come to my ubergeeky LUG-ish user group here in town: X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio (xcssa.org). But now that François has settled into the Tacoma, Washington, area, he has become heavily involved with his own local LUG there, taclug.org, and has been elected president!

My point here is that I am a strong believer in that people who use and love Open Source products (and specifically GPL products) need to contribute back to this planet-wide, utopian, software development model that we've built in whatever form they can. If you have programming skills, get involved by joining an Open Source/GPL-based project development group that interests you (sourceforge.net). For others, you might just join and support your local user group, assist at Linux Install-Fests, College LinuxFest events, or work for an incredible company that believes in and supports Open Source, such as Rackspace.

I could not have done this book without all the others that did their part. I would like to thank Chris for having the faith (or sheer workload-induced stupor) to ask for my help on this impossibly quick, monstrous undertaking. Working with him and Francois, both on the book and on helping to host the Linux Toys site (linuxtoys.net) community effort has been a lot of fun. I'm very glad that our paths all crossed when they did.

Also big thanks go to Joe Merlino and Kate Wrightson for spending countless hours trying to interpret and mold my raw research into something usable, to Sara for listening to my mail list whining about timelines, and to Debra for all her work in getting all this contract material worked out for me.

I would like to thank Rackspace-working there is the most fun I've ever had while getting paid! Plus it's such a super-rich learning environment to boot! It's been a wild ride since 1999. Thanks Rackspace, for allowing us to get some of our "in the trenches" expertise from the Fanatical Support Department in this book. This is a great way to give back to the community! Dirk, Pat, Richard-keep on "doing the needful" guys.

I would also be remiss if I didn't thank my parents and my Creator. Mom, Dad, thank you for bringing me up, keeping me engaged, challenged, and always supporting me. Thank you, God, for carrying me though the rough parts. It's to you I give all glory.

Most of all, I want to thank my wife, Teri, for giving up all the evenings and weekends that it took me to complete my portion of this work. Teri, I love you, and yes, I would marry you all over again.


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