I wrote a basic SNMP and MRTG tutorial for Windows and Linux on my wiki last night, just to collate most of what I’d picked up in the last few months, so go feast yourselves.

Also, I found myself repeatedly referring to a site called Linux Home Networking, which was written by a guy who decided to stop paying for hosting and do it at home instead, so I thought I should share the link with you. The site assumes you have experience with Linux but are a novice sysadmin and covers the basics from networking and interface management, to Apache web hosting, DNS, mail, MySQL, NFS, Samba, NTP, quotas, software RAID, LVM, centralised logins, centralised syslogging, kernel tuning and network monitoring and management with Squid, SNMP, IP Tables, and VPNs.

It’s quite a read for the novice Linux sysadmin or people wanting to set up home servers. It is also available as a paid for PDF and was expanded upon for the book The Linux Quick Fix Notebook. The best thing about the material is that it’s fast to read, much unlike the O’Reilly books on Samba and DNS, where you read 4 chapters on protocol descriptions and background before you touch anything (they still have their place though). It’s a great getting started and as a quick reference manual. No, I’m not on commission. I recommended it to one of my colleagues and I recommend it to you if you’re a budding Linux sysadmin.

While I’m here I’d also like to pimp Howto Forge, a site which publishes constantly new and updated howtos for almost any server or system application, though primarily focused on server stuff for the novice. I keep it in my RSS reader and look at anything I think I might have to do in the future. Again, great for beginning a new learning curve or for one off projects.

But read my SNMP howto first.