This book is designed to cover three objectives. One, to provide a comprehensive resource to individuals (including novice, IT/Non-HP-UX administrators, HP-UX administrators) who intend to take the Certified System Administrator for HP-UX certification exam and pass it. Two, to provide a quick and valuable on-the-job resource to HP-UX administrators, administrators of other UNIX operating system software, IT managers, programmers, and DBAs working in the HP-UX environment. Three, to provide an easy-to-understand guide to novice and IT/non-HP-UX administrators who intend to learn HP-UX from the beginning. This book contains 33 chapters. The book is organized in such a way that it helps its audience understand concepts, implementation procedures, some basic troubleshooting, command syntax, configuration files, and daemons involved. There are three key areas: UNIX fundamentals, HP-UX system administration, and HP-UX network administration. 1. UNIX Fundamentals covers the basics of UNIX. Most information is not specific to a particular UNIX flavor, but rather includes general UNIX concepts, file manipulation and security techniques, shell and awk programming, vi editor, basic commands, and other topics. Chapters 01 through 06 and chapter 21 cover this area. Unlike many other similar books, a chapter on shell scripting is presented after covering HP-UX System Administration chapters. This is done intentionally to provide readers with some practical examples based on the knowledge they have gained from UNIX Fundamentals and HP-UX System Administration chapters. 2. HP-UX System Administration covers the HP-UX-specific system administration concepts and topics including HP-UX installation methods; software and patch management; user and group account administration; disk and device file management; LVM and file system administration; swap space and printer management; system startup and shutdown procedures; kernel reconfiguration techniques; backup, restore, and system recovery functions; job automation and process control; system logging and performance monitoring; and so on. Chapters 07 through 20 cover this area. 3. HP-UX Network Administration covers HP-UX network administration concepts and topics such as OSI and TCP/IP models; network hardware overview; LAN card administration; IP subnetting and routing techniques; network troubleshooting tools; system startup services; naming services such as DNS, NIS, and LDAP; File sharing tools viz. NFS and AutoFS; Time synchronization using NTP; internet services administration; BootP/TFTP services; system security; and so on. Chapters 22 through 33 cover this area. The beginning of each chapter highlights objectives covered. The end of each chapter includes a summary as to what is learnt in the chapter. Throughout the book tables, figures, screen shots, and examples are given to explain concepts and tasks. The output generated as a result of running commands is highlighted in light grey background to differentiate it with surrounding text. The book includes several appendices one of which contains more than 550 practice exam questions. Tables of commands, important files, and service daemons are included in separate appendices.