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HP-UX 11i Systems Administration Handbook and Toolkit (2nd Edition) Review by Scot Harkins
Weak user admin section
While this tome covers many commands and steps central to installing and managing HP-UX 11i servers it falls terribly short on readability. This is what results from not having experienced writers in the technical pubs group. Where was the editor?
My biggest complaint is the user administration chapters. This book actually points you to the "vipw" command, which places a syntax and locking wrapper around a vi session on /etc/passwd. This leaves out /etc/shadow and other "modern" user admin constructs. "Modern" here means anything since roughly 1990. Directly editing /etc/passwd is widely considered verboten except in dire circumstances (uncracking a system, and other extreme recovery processes).
Even the "vipw(1M)" man page on an 11i box says "editing of the password file with vipw is generally discouraged. Please use sam, useradd, usermod, userdel, chfn, chsh or passwd to edit /etc/passwd." That was dated November 2000, before even the April 2001 first edition of this title!
The proper tools for local user admin would be "sam" for interactive/menu-driven control, and "useradd"/"usermod"/"userdel" for command-line control, plus a handful of other tools. Centralized admin through a variety of directory services is considered de rigueur in mid-to-large-scale environments.
If you really want this book then buy it used...and cheap...like $1-9 cheap. It will be useful for some of the HP-UX 11i-specific stuff, but there are lots of good admin essentials that include HP-UX and give better advice on managing Unix servers.