Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition. 13. LINUX Resources
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Very often it is not even necessary to connect to the Internet
to find the information you need. Chapter 16
contains a description of most of the documentation on a LINUX
distribution.
It is, however, essential to get the most up-to-date information
where security and hardware driver support are concerned. It is
also fun and worthwhile to interact with LINUX users from around
the globe. The rapid development of Free software could mean
that you may miss out on important new features that could
streamline IT services. Hence, reviewing web magazines, reading
newsgroups, and subscribing to mailing lists are essential parts
of a system administrator's role.
The
metalab.unc.edu
FTP site (previously called
sunsite.unc.edu) is one of the
traditional sites for free software. It is mirrored in almost
every country that has a significant IT infrastructure. If you
point your web browser there, you will find a list of mirrors.
For faster access, do pick a mirror
in your own country.
It is advisable to browse around this FTP site. In particular you should
try to find the locations of:
- The directory where all sources for official GNU packages are stored.
This would be a mirror of the Free Software Foundation's
FTP archives. These are packages that were commissioned by the FSF
and not merely released under the GPL (GNU General Public License). The FSF
will distribute them in source form (
.tar.gz) for inclusion into
various distributions. They will, of course, compile and work under
any UNIX.
- The generic
Linux download directory. It
contains innumerable UNIX packages in source and binary form,
categorized in a directory tree. For instance, mail clients
have their own directory with many mail packages inside.
metalab is the place where new developers can host
any new software that they have produced. There are
instructions on the FTP site to upload software and to request
it to be placed into a directory.
- The kernel sources. This is a mirror of the kernel archives where
Linus and other maintainers upload new
stable [Meaning that the software is well tested
and free of serious bugs.] and beta [Meaning that
the software is in its development stages.] kernel versions and
kernel patches.
- The various distributions. RedHat, Debian, and possibly
other popular distributions may be present.
This list is by no means exhaustive. Depending on the
willingness of the site maintainer, there may be mirrors to far
more sites from around the world.
The FTP site is how you will download free software. Often, maintainers
will host their software on a web site, but every popular package will
almost always have an FTP site where versions are persistently stored.
An example is
metalab.unc.edu in the directory
/pub/Linux/apps/editors/X/cooledit/ where the author's own
Cooledit package is distributed.
Most users should already be familiar with using a web browser.
You should also become familiar with the concept of a
web search. [Do I need to explain this?]You search the web when you point your web browser to
a popular search engine like http://www.google.com/,
http://www.google.com/linux,
http://infoseek.go.com/,
http://www.altavista.com/, or
http://www.yahoo.com/ and search for particular key
words. Searching is a bit of a black art with the billions of web
pages out there. Always consult the search engine's advanced
search options to see how you can do more complex searches than
just plain word searches.
The web sites in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
(see Appendix D) should all be consulted to get an overview
on some of the primary sites of interest to LINUX users.
Especially important is that you keep up with the latest
LINUX news. I find the
Linux Weekly News <http://lwn.net/>
an excellent source. Also, the famous
(and infamous) SlashDot <http://slashdot.org/>
web site gives daily updates about ``stuff that matters'' (and
therefore contains a lot about free software).
Fresh Meat <http://freshmeat.net/> is a web site devoted
to new software releases. You will find new or updated packages
announced every few hours or so.
Linux Planet <http://www.linuxplanet.com/> seems
to be a new (?) web site that I just found while writing this.
It looks like it contains lots of tutorial information on LINUX.
News Forge <http://www.newsforge.net/> also contains
daily information about software issues.
Lycos <http://download.lycos.com/static/advanced_search.asp>
is an efficient FTP search engine for locating packages. It is one of the
few search engines that understand regular expressions.
Realistically, though, a new LINUX web site is created every week;
almost anything prepended or appended to ``
linux'' is
probably a web site already.
A new phenomenon in the free software community is the SourceForge
web site, http://www.sourceforge.net/. Developers can use this
service at no charge to host their project's web site, FTP archives, and
mailing lists. SourceForge has mushroomed so rapidly that it has come
to host the better half of all free software projects.
A mailing list is a special address that, when posted to,
automatically sends email to a long list of other addresses. You
usually subscribe to a mailing list by sending some specially
formatted email or by requesting a subscription from the mailing
list manager.
Once you have subscribed to a list, any email you post to the
list will be sent to every other subscriber, and every other
subscriber's posts to the list will be sent to you.
There are mostly three types of mailing lists: the
majordomo type, the listserv type, and
the
*-request type.
To subscribe to the majordomo variety, send a mail
message to
majordomo@<machine> with no
subject and a one-line message:
|
subscribe <mailing-list-name>
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This command adds your name to the mailing list
<mailing-list-name>@<machine>,
to which messages are posted.
Do the same for listserv-type lists, by sending the same
message to
listserv@<machine>.
For instance, if you are an administrator for any machine that is exposed
to the Internet, you should get on
bugtraq. Send email to
to
listserv@netspace.org, and become one of the tens of
thousands of users that read and report security problems about
LINUX.
To unsubscribe to a list is just as simple. Send an email message:
|
unsubscribe <mailing-list-name>
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Never send
subscribe or
unsubscribe messages to the mailing
list itself. Send
subscribe or
unsubscribe
messages only to to the address
majordomo@<machine>
or
listserv@<machine>.
You subscribe to these mailing lists by sending an empty email message to
<mailing-list-name>-request@<machine> with the word
subscribe as the subject. The same email with the word
unsubscribe removes you from the list.
Once again, never send
subscribe or
unsubscribe messages to the mailing
list itself.
A newsgroup is a notice board that everyone in the world can
see. There are tens of thousands of newsgroups and each group is
unique in the world.
The client software you use to read a newsgroup is called a
news reader (or news client).
rtin is a popular text mode reader,
while
netscape is graphical.
pan is an excellent
graphical news reader that I use.
Newsgroups are named like Internet hosts. One you might be
interested in is
comp.os.linux.announce. The
comp is the broadest subject description for
computers;
os stands for operating
systems; and so on. Many other
linux newsgroups
are devoted to various LINUX issues.
Newsgroups servers are big hungry beasts. They form a tree-like
structure on the Internet. When you send mail to a newsgroup it
takes about a day or so for the mail you sent to propagate to
every other server in the world. Likewise, you can see a list of
all the messages posted to each newsgroup by anyone anywhere.
What's the difference between a newsgroup and a mailing list? The
advantage of a newsgroup is that you don't have to download the
messages you are not interested in. If you are on a mailing
list, you get all the mail sent to the list. With a newsgroup
you can look at the message list and retrieve only the messages
you are interested in.
Why not just put the mailing list on a web page? If you did,
then everyone in the world would have to go over international
links to get to the web page. It would load the server in
proportion to the number of subscribers. This is exactly what
SlashDot is. However, your newsgroup server is local, so you
retrieve mail over a faster link and save Internet traffic.
An indispensable source of information for serious
administrators or developers is the RFCs. RFC stands for
Request For Comments. RFCs are Internet standards
written by authorities to define everything about Internet
communication. Very often, documentation will refer to
RFCs. [There are also a few nonsense RFCs out there. For example
there is an RFC to communicate using pigeons, and one to
facilitate an infinite number of monkeys trying to write the
complete works of Shakespeare. Keep a close eye on
Slashdot <http://slashdot.org/> to catch these.]
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/rfc/
(and mirrors) has the complete RFCs archived for download. There are about
2,500 of them. The index file
rfc-index.txt is probably
where you should start. It has entries like:
5
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2045 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of
Internet Message Bodies. N. Freed & N. Borenstein. November 1996.
(Format: TXT=72932 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC1521, RFC1522, RFC1590)
(Updated by RFC2184, RFC2231) (Status: DRAFT STANDARD)
2046 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media
Types. N. Freed & N. Borenstein. November 1996. (Format: TXT=105854
bytes) (Obsoletes RFC1521, RFC1522, RFC1590) (Status: DRAFT STANDARD)
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and
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2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1. R. Fielding, J. Gettys,
J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, T. Berners-Lee. January 1997. (Format:
TXT=378114 bytes) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
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Well, you get the idea.
Next: 14. Permission and Modification
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