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System administration books used to be fairly predictabl . They showed you how to manage users, filesystems, devices, processes, printers, networks, and so on. They did not tell you what to do when new problems emerged. If your web site became popular, you had to learn quickly about proxy servers, different levels of caching, load balancing, distributed authentication, and other complex issues. If you added a database, you soon needed to scale it and learn to avoid SQL injection attacks. Overnight, sites became mission critical, and you needed the ability to make hot backups on 24 × 7 systems.
If you’ve been through these fire drills, you may have become tired of doing everything the hard way, facing new technical challenges nearly every day with few sources of help. Technical documentation—whether for commercial or open source software—rarely keeps up with the technology, and the gap seems to be widening. For example, open source directory servers have become important for managing computers, users, and resources. The original RFC-compliant protocols underlie many commercial products, but good documentation for community projects is surprisingly scarce.