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As a lot of people have. There are few who know it all, the key is knowing what you don't know, and learning what you need to know. Do I need to set up an LDAP server at home? Or a Mailserver? Or how to portmap my jigger to my thingamabob using Skalzor's port analyzer? Yes, I could probably learn all these things, but would I unless I needed to? Those are holes, but they may not need to be filled.

Basic stuff like quotas. How the kernel knows where the root partition is. What the difference between the exire time in an SOA record and the TTL in the zone file is.

Sorry, but you don't need to know any of that to be a sysadmin. You need to know how tools like netstat, nmap, etc work. You need to know grep, awk, sed, vi, ssh, and a host of others. You can easily learn those at home. There are things you may need in a "real job" that you might not learn at home, like how to set up a mail server, or how to set up a website. Sure, you CAN do that stuff at home, but you may not. If you have never set up a mail server, there is a LOT to learn. You don't want to do trial-and-error at a place of business. There should be classes out there that address this exact problem - "The 20 Things You Need to Know to be a Linux System Administrator in a Business".

I have been using Linux for 6+ years, and Unix before that. I am still learning things. I just wiped my main machine (Redhat 7.3) and installed Mandrake 10.0 on it. It was a learning experience. Things just work a little differently. I used to have a nice fetchmail/pine setup going, but it took me several days to get it back. WTF is this Postfix thingy? What pieces do I need, which ones can I disable? Hmm, kmail works but pine doesn't? All little things that had to be figured out, and there was nobody breathing down my neck about it either. FYI - you can get pine working with maildirs without patching it with this nice little hack. Many thanks to the author, I was pretty much at the end of my rope with this one.

That is what I like about Linux - when it works, it works well. When it doesn't work, it is fixable. Yeah, I could have just switched to mutt or some other text mail reader that supported Maildirs, but I am stubborn and knew there had to be a way to get it to work. And I like pine!

http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/tmp/mozilla-i68 6-pc-linux-gnu-1.6-installer.tar.gz.torrent

Thank you for that link to John Gilmore's essay. It is certainly one of the most moving pieces I've read on the topic in a long time, and gives me a bit of hope, because 1) someone (Gilmore) wrote it and believes in it 2) you linked to it, and probably believe in it too. I've added it to the top of my list of suggested readings.

1) It adds little or no value. Okay, so you feel that you can format the mail more readably using HTML. I find that I can make mails perfectly readable without it, so for me, it adds no value.

As I have argued before, HTML email, while it shouldn't be used for presentational purposes, can be used well to add semantics and structure. If I had my way, email HTML renderers would completely ignore all the deprecated presentational elements of HTML (bold, italics, font), and only rely on a user's personal stylesheet to do the rendering.

Could you possibly be more ignorant of what HTML is? You fail to realize that HTML is a semantic markup language, not some presentational language, which you obviously think it is, judging from your webpage, which uses a plethora of deprecated presentational HTML elements. I've written about the topic of HTML email at length; it comes down to the fact that HTML provides a greater means of communication since it is a semantic markup language, and since it is such, gives the ability of presentation to the reader, not the author, as which is done with flat text. Having the author decide presentation is one of the worst evils we are plagued with concerning email.

Personally, I despise any kind of marked up e-mail format.

Why in the world would you do such a ignorant thing such as to despise a semantic markup language such as HTML. It would be utterly idiotic to put down a semantic markup language, which has the purpose of providing a better description of the message's meaning to the reader. I've written about this at length on my website, so I'm not going to try to re-iterate this old, tired argument. In the end, HTML email providea meaning and structure, and gives the power of presentation to the reader, not the author.

A decent way to use GPG with Pine is to use pgpenvelope, available from http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/resources.html

Yes, I know mutt has good interface also, but Pine is also a decent mailer, and a lot of people use it, so I support it.

Sure, mutt is a great mailer, but it is lacking one very, very important thing that pine handles. News. I need news and mail together. I need to be able to apply the same filters to both. Plus, I've got a great filter for Pine that lets me handle PGP flawlessly. PGPenvelope

Hrm, you missed an important one for Pine:
pgpenvelope

http://www.neverending.org/~ftobi n/resources.html

PGPenvelope is a Pine filter written in Perl that allows one to use encrypt/sign/decrypt/verify
one's email messages with GPG or PGP5.
Ease of installation, ease of use,
and a nice interface were the primary goals during developement.
Also included are methods to verify signed messages through procmail with ease.