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Actually, there are lots of good references and tutorials on the web. The trick is separating the really good ones from mere fluff.

One starting point is The Linux Documentation Project site at http://www.tldp.org/ The guides http://www.tldp.org/guides.html contain fairly decent references and examples on bash scripting, CLI utilities, etc. The howto section has more narrowly task-oriented stuff http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto Note that many of the items have not been updated recently, but they remain valid.

A less comprehensive but more frequently updated collection can be found at http://www.linux.org/docs This has many task-oriented howto guides but lacks extended reference guides. However, it does link to numerous free online books http://www.linux.org/docs/online_books.html

Actually, there are lots of good references and tutorials on the web. The trick is separating the really good ones from mere fluff.

One starting point is The Linux Documentation Project site at http://www.tldp.org/ The guides http://www.tldp.org/guides.html contain fairly decent references and examples on bash scripting, CLI utilities, etc. The howto section has more narrowly task-oriented stuff http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto Note that many of the items have not been updated recently, but they remain valid.

A less comprehensive but more frequently updated collection can be found at http://www.linux.org/docs This has many task-oriented howto guides but lacks extended reference guides. However, it does link to numerous free online books http://www.linux.org/docs/online_books.html

I guess I'm one of those guys who you would assume "just knows," but really I often don't. I've been using Linux for seven years, doing it for a living for three, and I'd still put myself in the wide pool labeled "intermediate." But FWIW, here's the "secrets" I know. Prepare to not have your mind blown.

It's more about problem-solving skills than rote knowledge. If you ignore everything else I say, remember this one, it's the key to the whole thing.

There are books, and some of them are good (I really recommend this one and this one) but for the most part, the internet is "the book." Learn to use it. To start with, a good search pattern is [four or five word synopsis of problem OR pasted error message] [name of distribution]. Sometimes you'll get a bunch of old crap in the search results in which case you may want to put the version number of the distro at the end. 95% of the time that's your book.

Fuck all this "spare machine play-around box" nonsense. You want to learn? Fucking learn. Use it every day. When you can't figure out how to do something you want to do, go figure it out. Don't take no for an answer. Figure it out.

Related to that last, as a rookie I know that often I would run into a situation where I (rightly or wrongly) thought "omg, I screwed everything up, I should just reinstall and start over!" Resist this temptation as much as you can. Do it the hard way.

Set up a simple home file server using that spare box. Once you've accomplished this, come up with other stuff to do with it.

Figure out how to use your printer from the command line. That'll keep you busy.

Really, the unifying theme here is that it's more about learning the problem-solving methods. Set arbitrary tasks for yourself for no good reason and figure them out. Pick something you already know how to do with a GUI and figure out how to do it in the shell. Read read read. Those two books I linked above are excellent.

And don't let it scare you. If you don't let yourself get pysched out, it's pretty easy stuff.

Have fun, and godspeed.

I guess I'm one of those guys who you would assume "just knows," but really I often don't. I've been using Linux for seven years, doing it for a living for three, and I'd still put myself in the wide pool labeled "intermediate." But FWIW, here's the "secrets" I know. Prepare to not have your mind blown.

It's more about problem-solving skills than rote knowledge. If you ignore everything else I say, remember this one, it's the key to the whole thing.

There are books, and some of them are good (I really recommend this one and this one) but for the most part, the internet is "the book." Learn to use it. To start with, a good search pattern is [four or five word synopsis of problem OR pasted error message] [name of distribution]. Sometimes you'll get a bunch of old crap in the search results in which case you may want to put the version number of the distro at the end. 95% of the time that's your book.

Fuck all this "spare machine play-around box" nonsense. You want to learn? Fucking learn. Use it every day. When you can't figure out how to do something you want to do, go figure it out. Don't take no for an answer. Figure it out.

Related to that last, as a rookie I know that often I would run into a situation where I (rightly or wrongly) thought "omg, I screwed everything up, I should just reinstall and start over!" Resist this temptation as much as you can. Do it the hard way.

Set up a simple home file server using that spare box. Once you've accomplished this, come up with other stuff to do with it.

Figure out how to use your printer from the command line. That'll keep you busy.

Really, the unifying theme here is that it's more about learning the problem-solving methods. Set arbitrary tasks for yourself for no good reason and figure them out. Pick something you already know how to do with a GUI and figure out how to do it in the shell. Read read read. Those two books I linked above are excellent.

And don't let it scare you. If you don't let yourself get pysched out, it's pretty easy stuff.

Have fun, and godspeed.

Here you go: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-Root-Client-mini-HOWTO/index.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NIS-HOWTO/index.html Now you only need to administer the server and need not worry about the clients, but if you do manage to get the clients screwed up, use Parallel SSH: http://www.theether.org/pssh/

Here you go: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-Root-Client-mini-HOWTO/index.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NIS-HOWTO/index.html Now you only need to administer the server and need not worry about the clients, but if you do manage to get the clients screwed up, use Parallel SSH: http://www.theether.org/pssh/

http://tldp.org/ is this sufficient enough?

Is this what you call user friendly?
Ready for distribution to the typical Joe American as a Windows replacement???

Your issues have a lot in common with average issues my father has with Windows. He does what the typical Joe American probably does; he calls a knowledgeable person (me) who can help him. He's an MD and a smart guy, but has no clue about computers.
If you're not interested in looking up reference guides such as this one, you can always contact a friend (or the local Linux user group) to get help. After a while you won't be missing the annoyances in Windows or the limited environment in MacOS.
But, please don't complain about issues that is just as much of an issue in Windows if you have no idea what you're doing. Excercise: explain to Joe American that his Windows just lacks a driver for his network card (a very common problem), and how to identify the card and getting a driver from the vendor without internet. That is if the problem is not that his switch is unpowered or somesuch. Joe American won't be installing Windows from scratch anytime soon either, Linux is actually a lot easier in that respect.

So it was not possible to come up with a more intelligent word? If you have to explain yourself, it's a sign you should have come up with a much better and concise word.

Seriously, it's people like you and Mr.(?)-Linux-is-tickling-my-clitoris that drives women away from tech.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

When it's free -as in beer: 'Advanced bash Scripting Guide - Mendel Cooper'.

The /etc/passwd file also contains information like user ID's and group ID's that are used by many system programs. Therefore, the /etc/passwd file must remain world readable. If you were to change the /etc/passwd file so that nobody can read it, the first thing that you would notice is that the ls -l command now displays user ID's instead of names!

The Shadow Suite solves the problem by relocating the passwords to another file (usually /etc/shadow). The /etc/shadow file is set so that it cannot be read by just anyone. Only root will be able to read and write to the /etc/shadow file. Some programs (like xlock) don't need to be able to change passwords, they only need to be able to verify them. These programs can either be run suid root or you can set up a group shadow that is allowed read only access to the /etc/shadow file. Then the program can be run sgid shadow.

By moving the passwords to the /etc/shadow file, we are effectively keeping the attacker from having access to the encoded passwords with which to perform a dictionary attack.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Shadow-Password-HOWTO-2.html

I don't know the exact setup of ADS, but Linux clusters do auto-image all the time. There are plenty of tools for that. SystemImager probably does what you want.

For the whole Exchange server / Sharepoint thing, you're going to pay or you're going to opt for the "free for education" Google Docs.

Open Admin is an extremely mature school management package, and SchoolTool is an up-and-coming one, but school reporting requirements are so strict that many packages won't pass muster.

This kind of migration is extremely difficult and I think you're making too light of it.

You probably want something like the System Administrator Guide. Back in the day I just picked up the fattest RedHat book I could find, and actually read through it cover to cover. Don't think I ever actually ran RedHat, but it covered all the basics applicable to any distro.

Mostly, the information you want is in the man pages. 'man man' and 'man hier' to start.

I'm convinced linux isn't hard, though I've tried and abandoned it two or three times now for failure to run "required" apps that are windows only, or because the care and feeding is beyond my ability.

It's not hard in general, but if you have specific requirements it may not be able to meet them. For instance, my GF was quite capable of running Ubuntu and doing just about all her work and fun on it. Unfortunately, she requires Macromedia Freehand which doesn't work acceptably under Wine. Once you have your workflow down however, the "care and feeding" of a Linux install is much less than that of a Windows install.

Hmmm... You've made it clear you're not expecting free hardcopy, so you must be wanting links.

Of course to have found that you probably would have needed some uber-l337 mad google skillz.

I wrote three Linux books (one of which was reviewed here on /.) plus two Computer Based Training CDs. Though the last one was released about 6 years ago, I have a few thoughts for you that I hope are helpful.

Back when I did my first book, there wasn't much other than Word. I wound up writing most of it in vi. It sucked for me writing it and for my publisher to turn it into something that was ready to be published. For my second book, I had a collaborator and we wound up doing most of the work in Word since there weren't many adequate tools for Linux. We had one file per chapter and used the revisions to track what each of us did. The third book (and the two CBTs I did) followed that, though I think I did use what is now OpenOffice to write some and then save it in .doc format. The .doc format was the only format my publisher accepted that I wanted to use - I could have used TeX, but chose not to. In those cases, I did use CVS, but only to store the changing binary versions of files. I seem to recall that in every case, I could just send my publisher a list of words I wanted in the index and they'd build it for me.

If I were to write a new book, I'd do it in DocBook/XML. It's really great at abstracting presentation from content, and tools like OpenOffice can export as DocBook for you. Check with your publisher and see if they'll take it. If you're interested, there's a lot of useful information on DocBook in the LDP Author Guide, which I started writing years ago.

I think the important things aren't the tools, but more how you approach writing. You'll be doing this over a long period of time and you'll have to write a lot of pages. You need to be really disciplined to write N pages per day so that you don't get behind the curve and realize that you need to write 50 pages in the next two days before it's due.

I took care of this in a similar way that I write code. I started by listing the chapters I wanted to do, which was part of the proposal. I then started breaking down each chapter into smaller and smaller sections until I knew what I wanted to put in each paragraph, then start writing paragraphs. It really helps you focus on a few things instead of having to work on an entire chapter at once.

Good luck with your book.

The only computer language you will ever need.

Open source and coffee making have been around for years...just check out the HOWTO over at the Linux Documentation Project:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html

Turning on root squashing in the /etc/exports file fixes this. Any requests from UID 0 on the remote host are changed to 'nobody' on the server, thereby disallowing any special privileges even though a client is root.

If your PC has a public IPv4 address you can follow these simple instructions to configure an 6to4 anycast tunnel. That allows you to access IPv6 sites via the nearest 6to4-capable public router, whether or not your ISP supports IPv6 (provided they don't actively block 6to4 packets). Some scripting will be required if you want the tunnel to be persistent.

Note that the PC itself needs to have a public IPv4 address; this won't work if you're behind a NAT router. In my case I had already moved the PPPoE and NAT functions from the DSL router to my workstation, so setting up 6to4 was relatively easy. (The router didn't have enough RAM to track every connection, causing it to stall periodically.)

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/

I prefer PS1="\u@\h:\W\$ " myself, sometimes with some ANSI escape sequences thrown in for good measure (and color).

Never say never.

"How can you expect to be taken seriously after taking a rude swipe at the two most popular (and for good reason) editors out there?"

I concur, as I referred to in a previous post, it can be configured for basic editing. Same key presses as for MS Windows keyboard. For anything else there's a mode file out there. What's more it don't choke on large files and it's buffer ring means you never lose a file. eg, you don't write to the file but to a temporary buffer, until you save it. For search press CTRL s and start typing the search string, the text is immediately highlighted on screen. No nonsence with clicking drop down click boxes.

In contrast to that other WordProcessor that (in spellcheck mode) asks if you want to change the current word, only the dialogue box pops up over the word so as you can't see it .. :)

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html

Advanced Bash scripting guide.
Thanks MC.

No idea how/why this happens - no proxy was set in the OS or browser of the client.

A router can be configured to transparently redirect all traffic destined for port 80 (with any destination IP) into a proxy server; it's called a "transparent proxy" because your browser doesn't know it's happening. Here's more information and how to set it up on Linux.

If you can't spare the $39 per copy to buy the Linux Network Admin Guide, there is a free but slightly dated version available:

http://tldp.org/LDP/nag2/index.html

General principles are still valid and if you or your students get stuck, they can look online for updated material - a guided search, rather than a from-scratch. Plus, it will teach them one of the most important lessons in IT/IS - 'RTFM'. Good luck!

And NAT is a problem masquerading as a solution.

That was a terrible pun.

Not knocking the book, especially as I haven't read it, but I've found the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (available free online) http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ extremely helpful on numerous occasions.

What knowledge is there to be had by following instructions off some text phile you d/l'd off some pirate BBS, anyway?

... Uhm. Plenty.

TLDR: Documentation is a Good Thing.

I have to agree. If you didn't already know how to do it, then those instructions taught you how to do it. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was the point of a tutorial: Teaching you how to do something.

The Linux Documentation Project, at least, seems to think so.

Normally I'm in favor of elitism, but when one goes to the extent of saying, "There's no point in this documentation because anyone worth anything already knows it." they're going a tad too far.

Run level 1 is the single user mode.

There are no networking services, users, or so on and as far as I know, you can only log an as root and it doesn't require a password. Well, according to this, it should require a password before a shell starts but I have never seen it do that. Of course my experience is limited but the systems I have accessed in that way have been setup by people other then me.

I guess he WANTED to spend all that money and foced himself to run Windows. Otherwise he would have found the Kisosk HOWTO. Yes, very much outdated, but sill an interesting base for what you can do now. Interesting tips there.

Now it is even easier. Install Opera and run opera -kioskhelp to see what options you want. Use that instead of Netscape in the Kiosk HOWTO.

Once you have decided what parameters you want Opera to use to run, run only those things that you actualy need. Even disableling the keyboard and mouse and making the HD read-only, exept perhaps some small partition for cache and/or data users leave behind and logfiles.

If there is a network, you can write the data to another machine, so that the data is not lost when the machine is stolen. You can even connect more then one screen to the PC.

versioning, lots of options depending on what you mean:

-- straight linux OS level snapshots...
      http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html

-- source code management systems ... can be applied to entire file systems: git, subversion, tla, bzr, etc...

-- maintaining parallel copies: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2008063000526OSHL

surely lots of others too...

It would help if there were a comprehensive guide to windows shell scripting, along the lines of the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide.

Tell me, how do you do things like I/O redirection, or command substitution with cmd.exe? I ask because I honestly don't know. Note that Powershell doesn't count, as it's missing from a default install of Windows.

Why not just run "xdm" or other XDMCP compatible display manager on the box? Then you can log in remotely via Exceed , Cygwin/X (on Windows) or similar tools with built-in XDMCP browser. (See also: Linux XDMCP How-To) -- With XDMCP, you can have full access to a Linux (or other Unix) desktop.

• The ADSL Bandwidth Management HOWTO from TLDP is what got me started. It is quite outdated by now, though.
• The Advanced Routing HOWTO from TLDP. In particular, sections 9, 9.5 and 9.5.5. Note that it was outdated even when I read it, which was several years ago (you haven't had to patch your kernel to get HTB since 2.4.20 or so).
• The LARTC site and mailing list archives.
• The HTB home page.
• The manpages tc(8) and htb(8). (I wish they had existed when I learned about it.)

• The ADSL Bandwidth Management HOWTO from TLDP is what got me started. It is quite outdated by now, though.
• The Advanced Routing HOWTO from TLDP. In particular, sections 9, 9.5 and 9.5.5. Note that it was outdated even when I read it, which was several years ago (you haven't had to patch your kernel to get HTB since 2.4.20 or so).
• The LARTC site and mailing list archives.
• The HTB home page.
• The manpages tc(8) and htb(8). (I wish they had existed when I learned about it.)

As someone mentioned in a previous post, it's much easier to just whitelist priorized services such as ssh, telnet or gaming protocols than wasting too much CPU cycles on detecting obscure P2P protocols with layer 7 filters.

Personally, I use iptables & tc to setup a simple HTB (Hierarchical Token Bucket filter) system with 3 priority levels:

- Interactive: SSH (with Minimize-Delay TOS-Flag), Telnet, Jabber, ...
- Medium: HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, ...
- Low: All the rest

Shaping the upload speed is my only concern. All 3 classes may use the complete upload bandwidth. The interactive HTB class gets a guaranteed 90% of the bandwidth and a high burst value. The lowest HTB class has a burst of 0 and about 5% guaranteed upload speed.

While this is only primitive setup, it allows lag-free ssh with an unlimited upload in the background.

An in-depth how-to about the Linux Traffic Control system: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/index.html

A short pragmatic example using HTB & SFQ can be found here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Shaping

I was in a similar situation a while ago, and I really found the articles at linuxfocus.org to be helpful, especially this one. (It is about building a simple robot)
Linuxfocus.org (which is now hosted by tldp.org, but still has all the archived articles) is a good place to start for a programmer who wants to get into electronics. It is a linux hacking site that did some hardware on the side, so it tends to have beginner level electronics with some intermediate level programming to make really cool things.
The list of hardware articles can be found here.

I was in a similar situation a while ago, and I really found the articles at linuxfocus.org to be helpful, especially this one. (It is about building a simple robot)
Linuxfocus.org (which is now hosted by tldp.org, but still has all the archived articles) is a good place to start for a programmer who wants to get into electronics. It is a linux hacking site that did some hardware on the side, so it tends to have beginner level electronics with some intermediate level programming to make really cool things.
The list of hardware articles can be found here.

I don't know what work things you require, but Doom and Quake both work well on linux. Duke3d too. If you like old games, you'll find that very many of them are well supported on linux, either through source ports or emulators.

IPv6 barely supports firewalling or QoS. Open corporate networks for all.

What extra support does firewalling need from the IP layer?

IPv6 has no IP level encryption. Its in the standard, but no software or hardware implements it yet.

This looks like a configuration guide to enable IPSec over IPv6 on Cisco routers. And over here it says that Linux does IPSec over IPv6 since 2.4.28 and 2.6.9.

Change ISPs? Guess what. You have to re-IP your whole inside network because your IP range is solely defendant on a subset of your main provider.

That's definitely true for IPv4, but I thought the whole point of site local addresses was to avoid this issue in IPv6.

Then, there is the fact that IPv6 is not battle tested, so you will be experiencing the joys of the late 90s all over again, with similar attacks like pings of death, to teardrop and land attacks. Expect one (if not more) of the major operating systems out there to have a bug in the IP stack allowing anyone to send some currently unknown packet and get kernel level access from anywhere on the Internet.

True, but then again there are far more people involved in the Net today than in 1994 to 1998-ish when IPv4 stacks were getting pounded.

This isn't a troll; monitors and graphics cards have been able for donkeys years to tell the OS what resolutions and refresh-rates they are capable of for years now and X hasn't caught on.

Uh? Xorg (and XFree86 before) have been querying monitors characteristics via DDC for years. HorizSync and VertRefresh are just for really ancient monitors/graphic adapters. Look here if you don't believe me.

The paper shows that BIND 9 DNS queries are predictable i.e. that the source UDP port and DNS transaction ID can be effectively predicted. A predictability algorithm is described that, in optimal conditions, provides very few guesses for the "next" query (10 in the basic attack, and 1 in the advanced attack), thereby overcoming whatever protection offered by the transaction ID mechanism. This enables a much more effective DNS cache poisoning than the currently known attacks against BIND 9. The net effect is that pharming attacks are feasible against BIND 9 caching DNS servers, without the need to directly attack neither DNS servers nor clients (PCs). The results are applicable to all BIND 9 releases [1], when BIND (the named daemon) is in caching DNS server configuration.

I am not interested in learning the computer to recognize my terrible pronunciation, but rather to have some program expect to hear standard Chinese which I could practice with.

One extremely useful program I have found which is able to decode and show the tones is Wavesurfer. For those of you that do not know, tones play a very important part in Chinese speech, and it is kind of difficult to learn as a foreigner.

Request: Can any of you with knowledge within this field please contribute a little to update http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO/index.html, it is a bit dated.

That is what they are for, and is where I went when I first learned to set up my network (dns, dhcp, ipchains later iptables, etc). The neat thing is you'll stumble across something cool that you might not have thought of before.

http://tldp.org/

You want the ppp howto from 1997. See the sections on automating scripts and routing issues.

directly edit a snapshot?

directly edit a snapshot?

Yeah. There were already issues with slimy people getting stuff into the linux documentation project just to try to make money by redirecting people their way. Throwing in direct monetary compensation seems an invitation to all the scam artists of the world.
Plus this will even draw away legitimate contributors to things like tldp.org, which is the source of the HOWTOs many of us have relied upon in the past.