I am new to the whole scene of linux and managing my own server, (im sure you have heard this before, and your probably like damnet, how many n00b's could their possibly be, well its a good thing because it means linux is getting more popular) but anyway I need a good book, or maybe a really good step by step guide from setting up the distro to setting up a full qmail server. Basically a full LAMP setup. If you have any recommendations please let me know. I would like to use Debian, I have had really good results with my current setup, but I want to start from scratch, cause my friend set it up for me.. and I wanna learn how to do it.

I wanna be able to have VirtualHosts as well to have multiple domains, and everything. So please let me know if you have any suggestions. I like books as well, if you have found a good book please post it here.

Thanks.

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James Lenhart.

u can check out www.webmin.com

makes sys admin tasks much easier. u work with with a html 'gui' console and then you can hand-tweak configurations (which will be much faster doing it through the normal console) produced by webmin maybe even rewrite them. also there is a free webmin book that will set up pretty quickly too. google for webmin.

u also will want to try usermin, virtualmin in that order as well.
maven

Webmin is very unsecure, I find now that I am more efficient just hand coding it, but thanks. Back then I would have used it, now that I have read some docs, I can setup LAMP in about 20 minutes on a node.

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James Lenhart.

Yeah I agree, it's always best to learn by hands on instead of through an interface. http://www.lifewithqmail.org/ is a good giude for setting up qmail. I'm currently running qmail with no probs (well besides the prob that qmail is OLD hehe). I'll prolly give postfix another try in a month or so. Virtuahosts are done through apache, and are setup through the conf file. If you want a good book, try Barnes and Noble. I picked up a nice Linux admin guide there a few weeks ago.

-Brian

might be useful, maybe not directly but for building the distro part. lfs. intro at ibm. found it on slash today. quite educational
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/os-lfs/?ca=dgr-lnxw01BuildLinux

see below. duplicate post.

hi james, this might be interesting ...
Setting Up LAMP: Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP Working Together
by Eric Rosebrock, Eric Filson, Eric Rosebrock

...which is this one, in case you like to shop for books online (besides, there's a cover photo on Amazon.com, so you know what cover to look for in regular book shops):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 782143377/

Thanks for all the comments guys, I will be checking these books out soon.

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James Lenhart.

I'm just as new at Linux and setting up a server as the OP I guess (I only havea tiny bit of experience with FreeBSD on a non-root VPS system) - and I got my Linode just 2 days ago. First time Linux.

This afternoon I ran out to my local bookstore, and had a look at this book. Really excellent!

Of course you can find references to nearly anything online (and I browse a lot to do just that) but sometimes it's good to have a book, with real page pages you can scribble on an highlight phrases in. And it's even better with a book like this that doesn't just copy online references but explains step by step why things are done the way they are done and how it all fits together. I'll be using this a lot the coming weeks.

--Marjolein