Slashdot Mirror

FAQ contains all the info for:
6Wind (SixOS)
Cisco (IOS)
FreeBSD
Juniper (JunOS)
Linux - Debian
Linux - New - using iproute2
Linux - Old
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
Windows 98 / NT4 / 2000 / XP / .Net

As for linux, you should have taken a look in the everlasting Peter Bieringer doc at The Linux Doc Project.

according to the Software-RAID howto RAID 5 in software is just peachy.

• http://mako.yukidoke.org/projects/howto/
• http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Proj-Mgmt-HOWTO /

  I would know. I wrote it.

I have a home audio system which is customised to my own needs. I started off at http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-Box-HOWTO.html and built diskless systems such as this for all the rooms in my house, and can use all independently of each other.

They all run off a standard computer which I turned into a server when it became out of date (500mhz K6-2, 384MB).

It's very cheap to build the diskless systems and the only extra expense you'll have is the CAT5 cabling over the house (if you're like me though, your house is already CAT5 capable).

Tim

You could argue there's a shortage of IPv4 addresses everywhere as long as it involves more than the most trivial amount of effort or any cost to get hold of them.

IPv6 is very easy to set up and run on top of ipv4. More and more people are doing it and the most effort you have to do it enable the option in your kernel.

Running ipv6 on top of your existing ipv4 address is as simple as these 5 shell commands

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configu ring-ipv6to4-tunnels.html

Hmmm.. that's a fine point, and I'm not sure I agree with you.

First off, it depends on your definitions. Having a port to a platform that isn't part of the core project, IMHO does not count (especially since that port is not techinically what SCO is claiming IBM took).

UnixWare, AFAIK, did not have a core SMP capability prior to Linux. SCO Unix on the other hand may have, I'm not sure. Those are, of course, very different products, and again I think SCO is claiming that the Unix license that was sold to IBM *prior* to SCO's acquisition of the rights are the point of "IP loss", so claiming that they had it first in SCO would not help.

I would love to hear people who used to work for Novell weigh in on the timeline. I know that Linux had SMP on certain limited motherboards VERY early on and as early as v0.27, 05 may 1998, the new motherboards were being added to the already growing list of Linux SMP platforms....

As part of O'Reilly's Open Books Project, this book is also available (without the shiny binding) for free. You can also pickup PDF's and the like the Linux Documentation Project's guides section.

As part of O'Reilly's Open Books Project, this book is also available (without the shiny binding) for free. You can also pickup PDF's and the like the Linux Documentation Project's guides section.

"It may not level out if the jobs are flocking overseas. Those jobs could be gone for good."

I don't think that all of the jobs, or even a majority of them, will do that. Remember, it's good to have employees that you have at arms' reach, so you can throttle them when they screw up royally, metaphorically speaking. If they're physically in the same office as the corporation management, there is a lot greater quality control possible than if they're on the other side of the planet, working in a nearly opposing time zone. Easy to complete projects will be outsourced, but stuff requiring new developmental effort will remain. Also, if they're overseas, it might be more difficult to get financial restitution from them for something gone wrong, like the leaking of trade secrets, severe bugs that should have been fixed, and the like. The legal system there might not even give you a case. Here, there is precedent for dealing with employee misconduct, be it intentional or accidental, and restitution can sometimes be found.

"Speaking from experience, a lot of people that are left in the IT field actually DON'T have any idea of what a spreadsheet is."

I know. The sadder fact than that is that frequently people use spreadsheets, creating massive numbers of relational fields, macros, and processes, when they could use a programming language or shell script to achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.

" It's kinda sad that such a relatively young field has already bumped out the geeks that love and *know* software/hardware, and replaced them with drone opportunists."

Every field with high salaries is full of opportunists. The thing that computers/technology has as an advantage is that it's much harder to bullshit your way through. Sometimes people come into one of the Linux channels on IRC because they need help with a server they're responsible for, and they can't get this-or-that to work. When it's stuff documented at The Linux Documentation Project, or a Google Search away, I don't help them. I'll help those wanting to learn for themselves, but if they *need* my help to do a job, they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. They will eventually weed-out, because they'll find a problem that they can't beg for help to fix, and will expose themselves. Bosses don't like paying $129/hr or more for outside field help when they already have someone on staff who supposedly knows how to do it.

I do what I can to be the best technician/admin/computer guru that I can be. I work to show that my merit with what I do should give cause for me to be advanced, and it has worked several times. I'm fairly confident that it'll work again once the system has finished deflating from the bubble that blew.

Here you will find the pdf of the Linux Kernel Internals, authored by Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com). Now, he has been submitting patches to the kernel for a long time.

He submitted patches for (among others)

Microcode updates

iBCS patches

kgdb patches

Linux Implementation of SCO UnixWare BFS

and I'm sure a lot more, across a wide range of kernel versions (2.2/2.3/2.4 ...)

Why does this matter? Well his email used to be tigran@ocston.org. odd domain name, try reversing it.search and look at the first two results, then look here for more info about the first entry.

Before that his email was tigran@sco.org, but he
got a little paranoid
about it.

Searching google brings up patches supplied by him throughout the whole development cycle of 2.3/2.4 and more. He is directly connected to the author of the LKP on SCO Unix, draw your own conclusions here.

Also, I find that Security Focus has a huge backlog of very useful and interesting information for those concerned with computer security. In that same vein, dbaseiv.net [Google cache, the site seems to be down right now] is shaping up to be a huge repository of computer security knowledge.

The Linux Documentation Project is full of HOWTOs relating to Linux, if you've got a Linux problem that you need to work out (though HOWTOs make for really boring recreational reading).

This is just what I can come up with off the top of my head, I'll probably post a reply to this when I remember more.

Hmmm...How bout' LDP ?

You ought to have a look at the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

Enjoy.

Cheers
Stor

Heres a good document that describes why this happens and how to fix it yourself on a Linux router:
Advanced Routing Howto

Better documentation on accomplishing dual booting is available at The Linux Documentation Project's site. Kudos to IBM tho for making an effort. :)

I'm going to have correct myself. Apparently, font anti-aliasing has been included since XFree86 4.0.2 using FreeType

See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU/ for the Font De-Uglification HOWTO

and http://xlife.zuavra.net/columns/20020521.php for XLife column on Good Looking Fonts in X Windows.

I've seen some screenshots of Mozilla and Opera with nice Windows 9x-comparable fonts-moothing.

Can we have articles like this listed and catalogued in a single place somewhere ?

If I happen to be wanting to learn Glade 2 now, this article will be really useful. Otherwise, I could bookmark it for future reference (assuming it'll still be there in a few months time) - or download it, and save it on a directory somewhere.

What about having somewhere such as the Linux Documentation Project keep a collection of articles like this (or keep a list of dated bookmarks to useful external articles) - simultaneously making both the Linux Documentation Project, and the articles in links to, more useful resources to more people.

A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR
(Howto, Screenshot),
which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow)
or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.

cd /usr/src/linux && make mrproper && make menuconfig

make clean && make dep && make bzImage && make modules && mv /boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.old && mv /lib/modules/SOMETHING /lib/modules/SOMETHING-old && make modules_install && mv /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot

/sbin/lilo

modprobe usb-visor

More specifically you will find a number of links to projects not discussed in the threads I have seen so far, at the Multi Disk HOTWO where you can see how for instance Yoke and RAID can give you a fast reliable networked sharable file system. Someof these are research projects while others have been used for a few years. For even more fun you can stack file systems, like RAID0 with RAID1 where some of the drives are Yoke-connected over the net. Put inhertied fs on top and you have enormous flexibility, speed and reliability. OK so it is more complex but I am sure you can handle that.

And here comes the part I would like to stress: when you come to a conclusion, please contact the relevant HOWTO authors and give them your input. Only by your inputs can the Linux Documenttion Project improve.

There has been a HOWTO for controlling an automatic drip coffee machine for years using your legacy paraport. See Coffee HOWTO.

You have to just jump in! I too am already using IPv6 comfortably alongside my routed IPv4 network. I actually forced myself to start using it just 'cause, and it's wonderful. The autoconfiguration features are worth it alone. And I have a mixed network of Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Windows 2000, and Cisco. My bind/DNS is configured for IPv6, my sendmail is configured for IPv6, and so on. But the underlying IPv4 network is still there right along side. There's really no reason to not go ahead and start experimenting with IPv6, to get comfortable with it before you depend on it.

Actually my excuse to start playing with it was I was developing an application which could make use of multicasting. And let me tell you, IPv6 multicasting is a dream come true when compared with IPv4! And the sockets-API is much more sane and complete, after all the IETF learned from the shortcomings of the IPv4 API. See these wonderful resources and just jump in!

• RFC 3493 Basic IPv6 Sockets API
• RFC 2292 Advanced IPv6 Sockets API
• IPv6 Essentials Book, from O'Reilly
• IETF IPv6 Working Group
• Linux IPv6 HOWTO

So now that I'm enjoying it, I've been seeking out open source applications that use IPv4 and providing assistance to the developers to get them compatible with IPv6. A lot of the smaller projects in particular could use help, as some of them are unnecessarily tied to the IPv4 stack and probably don't even know it nor know anything about IPv6. I also suggest that anybody with some expertise to lend a hand as well. The open source/free software community can not find itself falling being here.

No one's ever written a System Administration guide that you should pay for! Now we can stop blowing our money on books with new information in them and buy ones like this!

No one's ever written a System Administration guide that you should pay for! Now we can stop blowing our money on books with new information in them and buy ones like this!

No one's ever written a System Administration guide that you should pay for! Now we can stop blowing our money on books with new information in them and buy ones like this!

The Linux Documentation Project is one of the best sources for general Linux help. It has a list of tutorials, called HOWTO's, which explain how do to almost anything, from setting up a web server, to getting a mouse wheel to work under X windows. If you're having a problem, chances are many other people have had the same problem, and at least one of them have written a HOWTO for your particular situation. Their website is here

Luckily, I am still employed, but I know that if the current economic conditions don't change for the better, I will be looking for work in a few months myself. It seems to me that one of the most irresponsible, even stupid, things that I could do now is to dip into my savngs to "improve my skill set" because a bunch of experts with books to sell have convinced the Chicago Tribune that there is another high tech boom just around the corner!

Well, you are lucky then, that it costs nothing to improve your skill set.

This ins't a troll but why does this howto exist? Doesn't the Linux Raid and SMP HOWTO cover this. TLDP.org is all you need

Rus

This ins't a troll but why does this howto exist? Doesn't the Linux Raid and SMP HOWTO cover this. TLDP.org is all you need

Rus

Well, while you are right that *this* has very little to do with scalability of linux, you might be delighted to see that $big_number-cpu systems are profiting quite well from newest linux scalability work (read till the end of that page).

105.02user 14.50system 0:04.83elapsed 2474%CPU
(0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k0inputs+0outputs
(394245major+570713minor)pagefaults 0swaps

isn't too shabby for compiling a whole kernel, is it?

Here's the Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO, good reading IMHO,
alternately here.
(Hopefully on-topic :)

We're both wrong.

According to the modem howto analog modems use shifts in phase and amplitude (I said frequency) to encode the data.

56k is a digital signal where the modem tries to synchronize itself with the 8kHz 8 bit SLIC (serial line interface circuit) on the telephone company's equipment. As I mentioned before, the phone company may use the least significant bit for in-band management, so you can only count on 56kbps instead of 64kbps.

and don't forget Linux on your Krups!

http://tldp.org/

My recommendation to you is to not just try and learn, but focus on one aspect and figure out how to do it. I'd suggest you first check out Linux from scratch: http://tldp.org/LDP/lfs/html/

I mean if you want a web server, download apache and play with it. Find the doc directory for your distribution and read! There is lots of information on web pages, just read a lot. Pick up a book on UNIX and learn about how files are structured, learn about links. Learn how to use ssh and when in doubt check out the man pages.

Make sure you know either vi or emacs (or both) and try and learn a shell script of some sort (I'd recommend either bash or c-shell). Also once you get a lot of this down, check out sed and awk. Most of this stuff is on the web and because of the vast ammounts of information to learn, there really isn't one book that isn't going to bore you.
-Chris

Hey, you're right, and the wonderful LVM documentation even has a Recipe for performing the backup. I assume that since the snapshot is read-only, dump should work fine without the issues Linus mentioned.

The snapshot partition just has to contain enough space to hold the changes made to the original volume while the snapshot exists.

yea, you are lost.

when you format a floppy in DOS...fat12

now, i dont think its *ahem* widely used for most HD filesystems

but it does exist.

You can do all this stuff. See the scsiinfo utility for diag and inquiry, scsistop and scsi-spin for start and halt, etc. They're in the scsitools packare in debian and they're written by Eric Youngdale.

Solutions for all of your issues are explained in the HOWTO.

• scsicontrol: scu, sg-utils
  
• scsiha: scsiadd or rescan-scsi-bus.sh
  
• stacker: mtx or scsi-changer

SCSI HOW-TO: 9.3 Tape driver (st)

Learning Linux was very difficult for me as well. The single thing that helped the most was having an extra working computer on the net that I could use to contact friends who use linux and access The Linux Documentation Project from. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to become proficient with any *NIX CLI... however learning Linux/GNU can be really rewarding. My advice: pick up a cheap 266MHz (or akin) machine you can use to figure out Linux/GNU on, before you try to use Linux as your primary desktop system.

1. When I throw together an old box (I thought I mentioned most of what I have are old p100s...maybe I didn't) I tune the kernel specifically for it and then leave it alone. It probably runs this way for 3 or more years (who 'upgrades' a p100 for cryin' out loud...?). When I build a machine for a specific purpose I get what I need and put it together - and that is how it stays for long periods of time. If you are upgrading your hardware 'frequently', then you must have more money than sense. Recompilation is a good thing, you are just used to be getting fed the 'dog food' so much you think its filet mignon.

2. Your second statement is pure FUD. Having used both windows and linux for many years now, there is no contest: Linux documentation is infinitely more useful than anything I have seen from Microsoft. With Linux documentation I get everything I need to install, configure, and maintain a system - as well as a wealth of information on the web via the Linux Documentation Project or directly from the application developers in most cases. All the basic unix commands are documented via man pages (simply type 'man ' in a command line shell, and you will get a concise listing that helps you specify the parameter list, as well as explains how the application works). Linux documentation runs the gamut, I will admit that; but, by and large, it is more useful. Microsoft documentation is written for an 8th grader, and is not useful for anything more difficult than changing your screen colors; I don't particularly care for Microsoft's paternal "We know what is best for you" attitude which shows everytime I try to find anything useful from a technical standpoint.

• Linux IPv6 howto
• Redhat 6to4 HowTo
• Debian 'howto' (actually mailing list post)
• Aaron Swartz's how to enable IPv6 in OSX

I read on this thread that the IP header's version field only has 4 bits (I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds awfuly clever). We are currently of course using IPv4, and 5 is reserved for some stream protocol thingy, then isn't it theoretically possible that we will want more in the future for other uses? If we decide we want 11 more, then there will be 17 differant IP versions, which cannot all be represented with 4 bits. Therefore we'll have to make the 5 bits (or 99 bits) for the version field, inso scrapping all previous versions including IPv6??

I have no idea whether this is technically accurate or not, does anybody else know?

LDP. IMHO though they need to be organized more like RFCs where an update officially makes an earlier version obsolete. I think a review process should also be used on LDP documents.

A ton of useful IPv6 information is available from Kame.Net -- once your setup is working, the turtle on the top of that page starts to dance :). I also found the Linux IPv6 HOWTO to be incredibly helpful.

-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the Free Nmap Security Scanner

If you want to -really- tune up your Linux system for power savings, read The Linux Battery-Powered Mini Howto. Using the methods presented in this howto, turning off my swap, and using console-based programs to do my work (such as vi) has increased my battery time from less than an hour to four and a half hours. When you cut the unneccessary crap and make sure that the hard drive is only on when neccessary, you can save a lot of power on laptops.

I dunno like if an OS was built around perl and discuss how easy it would be to setup yer various unix jobs.

Or if every form of data on your computer was saved to XML instead of all the propietary file formats nowadays.

Read this backwards. And this. And see if you can find this at a local bookstore.

Read this backwards. And this. And see if you can find this at a local bookstore.

>wabakimi box (now it's chat.carleton.ca)

Actually, it's now on the verge of being defunct. They're trying to replace it with this system called "connect" which rejects mozilla as a valid browser when I visit connect.carleton.ca. (It's silly, since it works fine if I go to the login page directly...) It's sad that future students won't all have nice unix accounts to play with, although I suppose for the vast majority of students there's no need for such a thing.

Mind you, this is all pretty off-topic to girls in CS unless you consider anything posted by a girl in CS to be somehow on topic, so here's a link that isn't:

Encourage Women in Linux HOWTO

I would recommend "Securing and Optimizing Redhat Linux," which goes into great detail, down to recompiling packages for greater security, exactly what permissions to set on specific files, etc. Its only drawbacks are: it's specific to Redhat, and only covers versions up to 6.2. Still, there's some good general advice that is applicable to other distributions.