Publisher's Forum
Welcome to the first issues of SysAdmin. We sincerely hope you find the contents readable, useful, informative, and intellectually stimulating. That is our mission: to provide you with useful information and tools -- and to create an off-line forum where system administrators can archive and share their expertise and concerns. We also hope you find SysAdmin substantially different from other UNIX magazines. We strive to be more technical, more practical, and more focused. Instead of exhorting you to periodically remove unneeded core files, we've included a tool that helps you determine whether a core file is important or not. Instead of telling you that overnight scheduling can improve system response, we've given you the tool you need to implement overnight scheduling -- the full source code for an overnight job spooler. You'll find tools throughout this issue; tools that help you prepare for disaster, tools that help you avoid security breaches, and even little one-line power-tools that you'll use every day. You'll also find authors who know their stuff and who know what it's like to be a working system administrator. For example, Sydney Weinstein is the Usenet ELM Coordinator. David Fiedler and Bruce Hunter co-authored UNIX System Administration. But you don't have to have several books under your belt to write for us. Our best stories often come from a working system administrator, like you, who has found a better way to solve some common problem. If you've developed a useful cript, or solved some nasty configuration problem, or improved the performance of some subsystem, write it up! But don't limit your writing to technical narratives. The ultimate test of a magazine is whether it meets the needs of its readers. Do you find our magazine useful? I'd sincerely like to know. Write me, email me, tell me what you like, what you'd like to see more of, and what you've seen too much of. Thank you for reading SysAdmin. I look forward to hearing your comments.
Sincerely yours,
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