Roughly 80 percent of the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet are Tru64 Unix systems. Top national laboratories, from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy to NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, depend on Compaq Computer Corp.'s high-performance Unix product.
In addition, some of the top companies from the fields of banking, telecommunications, retail, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing rely on Tru64 Unix for the security of their data and performance of their file systems. From the author's direct experience, it is known that many of the system administrators for these systems have benefited from knowledge included in this book. These administrators were able to get better performance or recover lost data, efforts that wouldn't have been possible without some of this "inside" information, much of which is not publicly available for a variety of reasons.
Mainly, the information is either provided to customers on an "as-needed" basis as part of internal technical documents, documented only in source code or included in manuals or reference pages that are not organized in a file-system-centric fashion. The "Tru64 Unix File System Administration Handbook" is an attempt to correct that lack of information availability.
Nevertheless, the book is the only one its kind on the topic of Tru64 Unix. This unique and authoritative text helps systems administrators and other technical professionals understand and master perhaps the most critical part of Tru64 Unix: the file system. This is where the operating system stores and manipulates all of the information that enables both it and other applications to function.
What's in it for Me?
This book, "Tru64 Unix File System Administration Handbook," explains how to manage, tune and troubleshoot a microprocessor. In other words, if Tru64 Unix is an automobile engine, then the file system is the microprocessor that keeps all of the engine components working together efficiently. In addition, this book will help systems administrators and engineers who are designing, managing and troubleshooting Tru64 Unix file systems at large corporations. "Tru64 Unix File System Administration Handbook" covers all of the newest and most advanced Tru64 Unix features, including Compaq's TruCluster and AdvFS (Advanced File System) technologies, which enable organizations to grow their systems by integrating many individual computers.
In addition, much of the material presented here has been used successfully by the author to teach internal seminars to software support specialists in the CSC (Customer Support Center). When CSC management made the bold decision to train specialists from other declining specialty areas in the rapidly growing Unix business, this material became the basis for a series of highly successful seminars. The seminar materials were used for what became known as Unix University. This program continues today. Anyone with a solid background in any modern operating system, such as OpenVMS, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT or another flavor of Unix, can quickly ramp up in Tru64 Unix specifics and be successful in a short period. So, much of this material has been "road tested" in teaching a high percentage of those specialists currently supporting the product.
What's Good?
There's a very good reason why I gave this book a 9 on of a scale of 10 points: It is the only book I've seen that's dedicated to UFS (Unix file system) administration.
This book not only covers the basics, but it also hits on some of the -- until now -- undocumented utilities of Compaq's Tru64 Unix. Some of the information in the book is only obtainable by purchasing Compaq's superb, but expensive, support. If you maintain systems that must be online 24x7x365, then you need this book.
Furthermore, this book is written primarily for systems administrators, systems and software engineers, software support specialists and others who must optimize the performance of, as well as perform advanced troubleshooting on, Tru64 Unix file systems. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic Unix system administration.
This book is based on Tru64 Unix version 5.0a, which was internally code-named "zinc" within Compaq. During most of author's writing, zinc was not a released product; therefore, some test cases have been tested on field test software or verified only on a 5.0 system. Every effort has been made to ensure that the functionality was not changed by the time 5.0a shipped to customers. Many of the major functionality changes were included in 5.0, which shipped for approximately six months. The 5.0 code stream also is known internally as the "steel" stream. That terminology also is used in this text. Most of the material is applicable to prior versions from the "platinum" release stream (4.0, 4.0a, 4.0b, 4.0c, 4.0d, 4.0e, 4.0f and 4.0g) and the "gold" releases (3.2c, 3.2d, 3.2e, 3.2f and 3.2g). Any behavior that may have been release-based, or changed in a particular release stream, will be so noted.
What's Bad?
There is very little to say that's bad about this book, except that the glossary and index could have been expanded to include more terms and acronyms and that finding these terms could have been made a little easier.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that some nontechnical aspects changed while this book was in progress. Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq merged, so many of the references to Digital are simply mentioned out of habit or legal naming requirements. Also, Compaq's Unix product has undergone name changes over time. Most people know that the 64-bit Unix product was built on a Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University. The OSF (Open Software Foundation, which is now part of the Open Group) took this kernel, added a Unix interface and renamed it OSF/1. When Digital added some system management and other tools to this framework, it became the original DEC OSF/1product. The name later changed to Digital Unix, around the time that the 3.2c version was released. Recently, following the merger of Digital and Compaq, the name changed again, to Tru64 Unix because, clearly, Digital Unix reflected neither the product's new ownership nor its 64-bit nature. The new name reflects these issues quite well.
Conclusion
The author, as a file systems support engineer within Compaq's Tru64 Unix group, is the ideal writer for this book. He trains and consults with systems administrators and engineers who are designing, managing and troubleshooting Tru64 Unix at large corporations.
He organized this book into nine chapters and three main topic categories. Each chapter covers a different aspect of the file systems on Tru64 Unix systems. The first three chapters discuss background topics for storage, LSM (Logical Storage Manager) and Unix file systems architecture. The next three chapters include coverage of the three most popular file system types: UFS, AdvFS and NFS. Finally, the author looked at sample case studies for configuring and tuning "typical" systems, and troubleshooting and recovering from some common problems. The chapters consist of the following:
- Chapter 1 introduces file system administration terminology. In addition, the author discusses some of the seemingly simplistic Unix file systems to help fill in the gaps in the knowledge of many users who may think they already know this topic.
- Chapter 2 discusses storage concepts and administration, including disk concepts, storage and RAID technologies, as well as Tru64 Unix device and I/O subsystem management.
- Chapter 3 discusses LSM. It includes architecture details, correct creation of logical volumes and methods for using LSM in the most efficient manner.
- Chapter 4 introduces the Tru64 UFS architecture, including the virtual file system, caches and internal structures for gathering information and tuning.
- Chapter 5 covers UFS. It details the UFS on-disk structure and covers tools and techniques for creating, tuning, troubleshooting and correcting problems.
- Chapter 6 explains the basics of AdvFS. This discussion is comprehensive. It begins with basic AdvFS adminis-tration and concludes with the advanced utilities. This chapter, along with Chapter 7, should be considered the real "meat" of this text because the information is truly invaluable for anyone interested in learning as much as possible about this exciting product.
- Chapter 7 discusses advanced topics in AdvFS on Tru64 Unix. The author introduces concepts like regular and metadata file tags, the on-disk structure and troubleshooting problems. He concludes with topics such as configuring and tuning AdvFS for performance.
- Chapter 8 covers configuring and tuning some typical environments. This chapter addresses some typical systems that have been designed and tuned to handle specific applications. As before, the author builds on and refers to the earlier material in developing this chapter.
- Chapter 9 offers troubleshooting and recovery examples. Once again, the author discusses real customer case studies using some of the techniques and tools presented in the previous chapters to troubleshoot problems and recover from disasters. This chapter is written in a tutorial style, meaning that the author includes some of the actual commands and results from a troubleshooting session, possibly on a real customer system. The value of this approach is that you can see how the command behaved "under fire," rather than in a contrived example.
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