If you use UNIX, you know that it can be a technically challenging environment. And if you're like most users, you have a job to do aside from exploring your operating system -- like analyzing that hot new stock, running another experiment, or typesetting another report. What happens when you have problems? What happens when the system slows to a crawl, when you can't get logged back in after a power failure, or when you've sent a file to the printer three times but have yet to find a printout? Your first choice for handling a problem might be to have the problem never occur. Your second choice might be to have someone else fix it, immediately. However, in the real world, sometimes you will have to investigate the problem and report it, and sometimes you will have to find an answer yourself. When You Can't Find Your UNIX System Administrator, part of our new What You Need to Know series, gives UNIX users tools for solving problems. It offers:

• Practical solutions for problems you're likely to encounter in logging in, running programs, sharing files, managing space resources, printing, and so on

• Just enough background on what's going on "behind the scenes" so that you can make sense of our suggestions, rather than simply memorizing keystrokes

• An explanation of how to present problems to your sys admin so that you're more likely to get quick, accurate support

• A list of the site-specific information to which you should have access, and a place to write it down

• A quick-ref card summarizing what to try first, second, third for commonly encountered problems

The goal of this book is not to make you a guru in your own right. The goal of this book is to get you back to the job you'd rather be doing.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 3 Ratings

Meet the O'Reilly authors... - 2000-03-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book will tell you what you will probably discover on your own after a couple of months of serious use with Unix. The examples are very practical and very useful. I liked another interesting thing about this book. The authors from O'reilly books (Linda Lamb, Mike Loukides and the other unix gurus) tell some of their practical experiences. That's a nice touch!

Great book, slightly misnamed. - 2001-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
I like this book a lot - it's a quick ramp-up to the basics of unix, from a different angle, that is not how to do things but rather how to solve problems.

As someone who used to be a VMS system administrator, I think *all* users should read this book. Most of the problems are rather trivial, and a sysadmin shouldnt be bothered with them.

As someone who had to was thrown into the water as a new unix user who could *not* talk with the computer's sysadmin (except via email, which would be answered by the very busy sysadmins who have to handle hundrends of students when they dont have more urgent things to do) at about the time this book came out, I've found this book a gem.

I recommend this book to any site which has new unix users, and have a copy made available to any new user to check with before escalating it to the sysadmin.

This book is a "God send" - 2001-09-22
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a "must have" for every Unix user. At our office we have in the past created "cheat sheets" for Unix users in the event that our administrator is not around. This book covers everything that a user needs to know and more. I found the chapter on problem solving to be extremely useful. I plan to recommend that all of the Unix users in our office get a copy of this book.

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