The remaining soil medium - and there are a lot of it, as this book covers more than 1,100 mostly unillustrated pages - is the knowledge that a system administrator needs. To meet the "work" side of the equation, there are "best practices" section that recommends how to configure the various pieces of the system. The authors instead prefer to use prose to describe a solid thought process: "This is what we want to achieve (say, to harden the system before it is connected to the network), here are issues related to the purpose (known openings in the default configuration , the technique is known that the attacker used, and so on), and here are the tools and procedures recommended to combat the problem. "This is an excellent approach for administrators who approach their job as a Wall engineering problems. - David Topics covered: How to become a Unix system administrator with an intimate knowledge of all critical's subsystem of your machine.