The 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration won't be out for another year. However, we've released a set of 8 chapters on SafariBooksOnline.com (SBO). We've taken the previous edition's chapter on "workstations" and expanded it to be an 8-chapter segment on managing a fleet of workstations (laptops and desktops). You'll find we've done something similar for many of the chapters that we're rewriting for the new edition.
Part II: Workstation Fleet Management
- Chapter 4: Workstation Architecture
- Chapter 5: Workstation Hardware Strategies
- Chapter 6: Workstation Software Lifecycle
- Chapter 7: OS Installation Strategies
- Chapter 8: Workstation Service Definition
- Chapter 9: Workstation Fleet Logistics
- Chapter 10: Workstation Standardization
- Chapter 11: Onboarding New Employees
Part III is about Servers. But you'll have to wait a while to see those.
IMPORTANT: The SBO system lets you post comments. Please do! We're releasing these chapters because we want feedback. Please at least tell us if we're going in the right direction!
We hope that these new chapters being a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the problem of maintaining a corporate fleet of machines for our users.
I think the funniest line so far is in Chapter 8. The most unique chapter is 11.
Enjoy!
Tom