First off, RTFM. CentOS is pretty much a RedHat clone, and their documentation is great and easy to understand.
Some general hints in no specific order:
- Go through all files in/etc/sysconfig, learn what they're doing and configure them as needed.
- Run chkconfig --list, find out what each and every one of those services do and enable/disable them as required.
- Don't plug in the network cable before you've done a rough setup of iptables. There's even a console based GUI for that.
- Never, never ever use easy passwords like root:root123, test:blah and similar. Believe me, if your sshd is accessible from the outside you *will* have a Brazilian script kiddie on it within minutes.
- After installing a service like apache or ntpd immediately find the config files and read through and try to understand all of them. Getting everything only half-working is of no use.
- Take your time and don't let anybody stress you about getting that server ready for production. Once there's stuff running on it any oversight will cost you.
- Do *not* optimize for performance. The server's probably fast enough as it is. Unless you know exactly what you're doing you'll probably only screw up and/or waste your time by optimizing a server that has a load of 0.02 anyway.
- Before moving to configure a different piece of software test everything as well as possible. Try logging in to your new ftpd as anonymous and start a warez archive. See if apache leaks configuration information. Use your mail server as anonymous relay.
- Learn whatever you can about the server itself. Install vendor-provided administration utilities and try to set up system event logging and notifications.
- Run yum update (or even upgrade) *before* going into production.
- Trust most default values of packages you've installed, but don't trust them blindly. If in doubt, read the man page or documentation.
- Most security stuff will be adequate out-of-the-box. Take precautions but don't be too paranoid. Trying to implement your own perfect security measures without knowing enough about the details, modifying perfectly good default PAM settings and similar will probably only decrease security.
- Don't forget why you're running a Linux distribution and not Linux From Scratch. Their packages, configuration subsystem, file paths, init scripts and so on are probably not according to the way you would have done it but customizing everything will only cause you tons of additional work down the road. Only customize when you have a good reason, no way around it or need to deploy your own setup to many servers.
- Last but not least, play with it as long as possible. Toying around and with and exploring a non-production server without breaking too much will teach you more real-life experience than any book could provide.
Indeed. Which is why it's a conspiracy theory and not something I'll ever know the truth of. Anyway, I'm actually looking forward to the promised tech support emails. If you continue with stuff like that I might actually start to like Idle, whether or not this fits your evil plans;-)
Now please excuse me, I have to write a user style sheet to wrap idle.slashdot.org with a tinfoil background image.
I have a suspicion that idle might actually be a good thing to happen to slashdot. Here's my conspiracy theory:
IIRC Taco has full control over the stories and editing of slashdot, but marketing, advertisement and other things are mandated by corporate overlords. I somehow suspect that a bunch of trained monkeys in the marketing department created a lot of pressure to make Slashdot more Digg-alike and in a moment of pure genius, Taco created idle - the best parody of Digg the world has ever seen. It's colorful and flashy to please the marketing department, contains the worst stories and oldest mémes out there to convince them this isn't going to work out, all the while preserving the rest of Slashdot and consuming the least money and effort possible.
I mean just look at it and the way it's announced. It's as if the Slashdot team wants us to hate it.
Ah thanks, didn't think about doing something before returning. I must admit this is a valid argument. On the other hand, I don't think that this rule should be set in stone in any practical coding standard. I've seen way too much code where a simple early return statement could have prevented insanely deep nesting which makes the code hard to understand, especially with inexperienced programmers who don't know how to simplify the logic.
I also absolutely agree with you on the point of breaking code out into a function. It's just that the proper solution is unlikely to be the one you encounter in real-life projects. *sigh*
maybe continue or multiple return statements were off-limits.
Now why would anybody do this? I've always assumed code like this was basically what inexperienced people would use:
if(condition) { // 100s of lines of code return true; } else return false;
Why not just return immediately if any basic conditions or assumptions are not met and prevent that completely unnecessary indentation? The only advantage I can see is that you could miss the return statement when reading the code.
In Austria (and Germany afaik) it's basically the same as in the sibling post. If it says it costs EUR x, then that's what you'll have to pay and nothing more, never mind whether it's a cell phone contract or a cheese burger. If there's any surcharges or the quote is without taxes (which is rare) it has to be mentioned explicitly. The only exception are business-oriented product where prices are given without taxes because businesses often don't have to pay those. Many places even don't list applicable taxes apart from VAT and just include them in the final price.
Yes, people still do. ICQ is my primary IM network and most people I know have been using it since early 2000, give or take a couple of years.
Back then, there weren't many IM networks around, the ICQ client was pretty good and advanced, AOL/AIM didn't have much of a market here in Europe, MSN didn't exist or wasn't installed by default and YIM came too late to the game. ICQ became the dominant instant messenger around here and most people just stuck with it. It was also IIRC the first IM protocol to be reverse engineered properly and became a favorite of the local Linux users (licq is IMHO still one of the best ICQ clients out there).
ICQ is also pretty comfortable because it seems to be used mostly among people of my age group, while all the annoying teens I wouldn't want to talk to anyway have migrated over to MSN. Apparently, it's also very popular in Russia.
If however it can run arbitary x86 code directly all bets are off and operating system security is basically non-existent except at the hardware level....
What exactly do you mean? Any x86 code will either pretty much have to use syscalls to do anything useful and thereby run under normal user privileges or - as you said - will cause exceptions because it's not running in ring 0 and can't do anything privileged on the hardware side of things.
I agree, it's awful. What's even worse is that it breaks the Firefox Slashdotter extension and I absolutely can't stand browsing/. without it. IMHO they should just have added many features the extension provides (inline expansion of long comments, quick reply, inline showing/hiding of comments, etc) instead of doing yet another useless and ugly redesign.
Him. Buried somewhere deep inside the/. database is a comment where he inadvertently exposed the URL of his website and thereby his real name. Can't seem to find it though, maybe somebody else has bookmarked the link.
IMHO you are one of the few "activists" out there who have stayed true to their promises. I signed the petition and you have my full support.
The actual (and *important*) reason why I'm replying: Please be aware that there is at least one outspoken Nay in your petition. Better read through all the comments so that those numbers are accurate and can in no way be held against you.
Your comment deserves applause. It's hard to find true words with all the recent artificially created hostility towards smokers and non-opposing non-smokers.
It's not only about holding the protest on a Saturday - March 15th is the Idus Martiae, the Ides of March, which perfectly fits Anonymous' style of rhetoric.
It would be possible, yes, but would it also be practical? More often than not, it's not just a simple query to a whois server. For instance, in the case of Network Solutions, you'd have to put it in your cart for them to register it and afaik there's a hard limit on how many they'll register for you.
Then, there's the allegations that ISPs, whois cache providers etc. sell or abuse their query statistics to snag up unregistered domains that received the most queries, in which case your solution wouldn't do anything at all.
And last but not least, you're trying to fight a social/political problem with technology. You might cause an arms race between the providers and a bunch of geeks, but this is far from a proper solution to the issue at hand.
That is correct, although IMHO that defeats the purpose of having multiple tabs. I mostly read Slashdot while working on unrelated things and having to resize the window depending on the layout of the website in each tab is too bothersome.
It's pretty nice - at least until you realize that long horizontal lines of text are more strenuous to read. Shorter lines with more rows are a lot easier on the eyes.
Whoa, thanks for the ui.allow.platform.filepicker hint. I always thought there was no alternative to the Gnome one. My sanity really appreciates the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, RTFM. CentOS is pretty much a RedHat clone, and their documentation is great and easy to understand.
/etc/sysconfig, learn what they're doing and configure them as needed.
Some general hints in no specific order:
- Go through all files in
- Run chkconfig --list, find out what each and every one of those services do and enable/disable them as required.
- Don't plug in the network cable before you've done a rough setup of iptables. There's even a console based GUI for that.
- Never, never ever use easy passwords like root:root123, test:blah and similar. Believe me, if your sshd is accessible from the outside you *will* have a Brazilian script kiddie on it within minutes.
- After installing a service like apache or ntpd immediately find the config files and read through and try to understand all of them. Getting everything only half-working is of no use.
- Take your time and don't let anybody stress you about getting that server ready for production. Once there's stuff running on it any oversight will cost you.
- Do *not* optimize for performance. The server's probably fast enough as it is. Unless you know exactly what you're doing you'll probably only screw up and/or waste your time by optimizing a server that has a load of 0.02 anyway.
- Before moving to configure a different piece of software test everything as well as possible. Try logging in to your new ftpd as anonymous and start a warez archive. See if apache leaks configuration information. Use your mail server as anonymous relay.
- Learn whatever you can about the server itself. Install vendor-provided administration utilities and try to set up system event logging and notifications.
- Run yum update (or even upgrade) *before* going into production.
- Trust most default values of packages you've installed, but don't trust them blindly. If in doubt, read the man page or documentation.
- Most security stuff will be adequate out-of-the-box. Take precautions but don't be too paranoid. Trying to implement your own perfect security measures without knowing enough about the details, modifying perfectly good default PAM settings and similar will probably only decrease security.
- Don't forget why you're running a Linux distribution and not Linux From Scratch. Their packages, configuration subsystem, file paths, init scripts and so on are probably not according to the way you would have done it but customizing everything will only cause you tons of additional work down the road. Only customize when you have a good reason, no way around it or need to deploy your own setup to many servers.
- Last but not least, play with it as long as possible. Toying around and with and exploring a non-production server without breaking too much will teach you more real-life experience than any book could provide.
I'm a subscriber you insensitive clo... ooh, those just might be the ads I'm looking for!
Indeed. Which is why it's a conspiracy theory and not something I'll ever know the truth of. Anyway, I'm actually looking forward to the promised tech support emails. If you continue with stuff like that I might actually start to like Idle, whether or not this fits your evil plans ;-)
Now please excuse me, I have to write a user style sheet to wrap idle.slashdot.org with a tinfoil background image.
I have a suspicion that idle might actually be a good thing to happen to slashdot. Here's my conspiracy theory:
IIRC Taco has full control over the stories and editing of slashdot, but marketing, advertisement and other things are mandated by corporate overlords. I somehow suspect that a bunch of trained monkeys in the marketing department created a lot of pressure to make Slashdot more Digg-alike and in a moment of pure genius, Taco created idle - the best parody of Digg the world has ever seen. It's colorful and flashy to please the marketing department, contains the worst stories and oldest mémes out there to convince them this isn't going to work out, all the while preserving the rest of Slashdot and consuming the least money and effort possible.
I mean just look at it and the way it's announced. It's as if the Slashdot team wants us to hate it.
Ah thanks, didn't think about doing something before returning. I must admit this is a valid argument. On the other hand, I don't think that this rule should be set in stone in any practical coding standard. I've seen way too much code where a simple early return statement could have prevented insanely deep nesting which makes the code hard to understand, especially with inexperienced programmers who don't know how to simplify the logic.
I also absolutely agree with you on the point of breaking code out into a function. It's just that the proper solution is unlikely to be the one you encounter in real-life projects. *sigh*
Now why would anybody do this? I've always assumed code like this was basically what inexperienced people would use:
Why not just return immediately if any basic conditions or assumptions are not met and prevent that completely unnecessary indentation? The only advantage I can see is that you could miss the return statement when reading the code.
In Austria (and Germany afaik) it's basically the same as in the sibling post. If it says it costs EUR x, then that's what you'll have to pay and nothing more, never mind whether it's a cell phone contract or a cheese burger. If there's any surcharges or the quote is without taxes (which is rare) it has to be mentioned explicitly. The only exception are business-oriented product where prices are given without taxes because businesses often don't have to pay those. Many places even don't list applicable taxes apart from VAT and just include them in the final price.
Yes, people still do. ICQ is my primary IM network and most people I know have been using it since early 2000, give or take a couple of years.
Back then, there weren't many IM networks around, the ICQ client was pretty good and advanced, AOL/AIM didn't have much of a market here in Europe, MSN didn't exist or wasn't installed by default and YIM came too late to the game. ICQ became the dominant instant messenger around here and most people just stuck with it. It was also IIRC the first IM protocol to be reverse engineered properly and became a favorite of the local Linux users (licq is IMHO still one of the best ICQ clients out there).
ICQ is also pretty comfortable because it seems to be used mostly among people of my age group, while all the annoying teens I wouldn't want to talk to anyway have migrated over to MSN. Apparently, it's also very popular in Russia.
My assembler-fu is weak, but this rather looks like a fork bomb to me.
I know it's a bit late now, but the answer is daddypants at slashdot.org
Here's a chart that might help you make your decision. Being surrounded by art majors suddenly doesn't seem to be such a bad idea after all.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/uploaded_images/Picture-1-720552.png
PLEASE FORGET doing that.
I agree, it's awful. What's even worse is that it breaks the Firefox Slashdotter extension and I absolutely can't stand browsing /. without it. IMHO they should just have added many features the extension provides (inline expansion of long comments, quick reply, inline showing/hiding of comments, etc) instead of doing yet another useless and ugly redesign.
Him. Buried somewhere deep inside the /. database is a comment where he inadvertently exposed the URL of his website and thereby his real name. Can't seem to find it though, maybe somebody else has bookmarked the link.
IMHO you are one of the few "activists" out there who have stayed true to their promises. I signed the petition and you have my full support.
The actual (and *important*) reason why I'm replying: Please be aware that there is at least one outspoken Nay in your petition. Better read through all the comments so that those numbers are accurate and can in no way be held against you.
Thank you for your commitment to Open Source.
Your comment deserves applause. It's hard to find true words with all the recent artificially created hostility towards smokers and non-opposing non-smokers.
What an alliteration. If I was wearing a hat, it would be off to you!
It's not only about holding the protest on a Saturday - March 15th is the Idus Martiae, the Ides of March, which perfectly fits Anonymous' style of rhetoric.
Work of pure genius! Thanks, made my day :)
Then, there's the allegations that ISPs, whois cache providers etc. sell or abuse their query statistics to snag up unregistered domains that received the most queries, in which case your solution wouldn't do anything at all.
And last but not least, you're trying to fight a social/political problem with technology. You might cause an arms race between the providers and a bunch of geeks, but this is far from a proper solution to the issue at hand.
Are you sure about number 2? Shouldn't any registered domain at least answer an NS query?
That is correct, although IMHO that defeats the purpose of having multiple tabs. I mostly read Slashdot while working on unrelated things and having to resize the window depending on the layout of the website in each tab is too bothersome.
It's pretty nice - at least until you realize that long horizontal lines of text are more strenuous to read. Shorter lines with more rows are a lot easier on the eyes.
Whoa, thanks for the ui.allow.platform.filepicker hint. I always thought there was no alternative to the Gnome one. My sanity really appreciates the difference.