Sloan Joseph
This book is written primarily for individuals new to network administration. It should also be useful to those of you who have inherited responsibility for existing systems and networks set up by others. This book is designed to help you acquire the additional information you need to do your job.Unfortunately, the book may also appeal to crackers. I truly regret this and wish there were a way to present this material to limit its worth to crackers. I never met a system manager or network administrator who wasn't overworked. Time devoted to security is time stolen from providing new services to users or improving existing services. There simply is no valid justification for cracking. I can only hope that the positive uses for the information I provide will outweigh the inevitable malicious uses to which it may be put. I would feel much better if crackers would forego buying this book.In writing this book, I attempted to write the sort of book I often wished I had when I was learning. Certainly, there are others who are more knowledgeable and better prepared to write this book. But they never seemed to get around to it. They have written pieces of this book, a chapter here or a tutorial there, for which I am both immensely thankful and greatly indebted.
