Re: server change for mindprod.com

Roedy Green wrote:
On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:51:33 +0000, Martin Gregorie
<martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

Seems pretty quick, but you'd best revise your Linux page, which is doing a disservice to your otherwise good site.

Would you care to rewrite it, or tell me what needs to updated?
>
I won't rewrite it, any more that I'd expect or allow anybody else to rewrite pages on my website. However, as I do expect and act on criticisms of the speed/formatting/content of my site and I assume you're the same, here goes. The following applies only to your Linux page:

For some reason the the page loads very slowly under Opera 9.24. Even on redisplaying the page (clicking the browser's back arrow after following a link off it) there's a several second delay while the title bar flashes, switching between its 'current focus' and 'unselected' appearances, before the page content appears. I haven't yet checked of Firefox 2.0 also does this.

The Blackdown URL (1st para) gives a 404. Is Blackdown even relevant any more? I went straight to Sun J2SE (running RedHat Fedora Core 1 at the time) and now I'm weaving and ducking to avoid gcj, which is a standard dependency within Fedora Core 7.

The 2nd para should just ignore the earlier RedHat distributions. Anybody who uses RedHat privately will probably go for Fedora (current is Fedora Core 8) and commercial users will probably install Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Intro 1: Ignore Caldera - its now history. All current distros have vastly improved installers. My last clean FC7 install took under an hour from a single DVD and "just worked". The only reboot was at the end to start Linux. This left me with a working system connected to the Internet with a full set of development tools, databases, an office productivity suite and all the Internet utilities including Apache. The only external I had to install was Opera, my preferred web browser.

I had downloaded the DVD image (2.8 GB, 90 minutes on broadband) and burnt the disk myself, but copies are readily available for about GBP 5.00 by mail for those with slower internet connections.

The last time I reinstalled Win95 it took three days and innumerable reboots by the time I'd reformatted the disk, installed all the drivers from their separate disks and then loaded all the various packages needed to make the system usable (MS Office, Opera, Borland C, Java, Internet utilities, ...).

Equivalents: please remove rsh - nobody uses that these days - it sends passwords as plain text. ssh does everything at least as well and more securely. Telnet is used only for debugging and for accessing legacy applications - plain text passwords again! Add sftp and gftp alongside ftp - sftp does encrypted transfers and gftp is graphical, very similar to WS-FTP. As a new entries, add The Gimp as equivalent to Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, etc. XMMS and Audacious are audio players equivalent to Winamp.

Installation, Installing hard disk partitions are now obsolete. The various live CDs (Ubuntu, Knoppix etc) just run when put in the drive and won't alter your HDD unless you tell them to. Fedora's installer seamlessly handles everything you mention here. AFAIK the same applies to other current distros too. My FC7 setup (on a 40 GB disk) uses these partitions:

Name Size %used Comment

/boot 256 MB 9% contain kernel boot image(s)
/ 2 GB 16% root login, essential programs, temp disk, etc
/var 2 GB 14% system logs, NNTP files, mailboxes
/usr 15 GB 24% standard Linux programs
/home 15 GB 44% all logins and user data.
swap 1 GB - excessive (4 x RAM)

and all were defined, created and formatted by the installer. This system runs SAMBA to fool my remaining Win95 box into thinking that its a Windows file and print server. If it was dual boot, the Windows partitions would appear alongside these and I'd be using GRUB, the Linux boot system, to boot Linux or Windows.

Installing Video: XFree86 is obsolete, replaced by Xorg. Both the Live CDs and the Fedora installer can configure that without assistance.

Internet installation: The Fedora installer asks for IP, gateway, hostnames, etc., does the Internet configuration and sets up your firewall as part of the standard installation.

Additional Hardware: generally speaking, this is plug 'n play: its detected at boot time and used automatically. USB devices are detected automatically when plugged in. Memory sticks and disks are auto-mounted and icons put on your desktop. Ditto CDs and DVDs. Printer configuration is no harder than for Windows.

Re-installing and clean installing an upgrade: Yes, in general, but don't keep the whole of /etc because putting the lot back will upset an upgrade. I just keep the files I've manually changed (hosts, SAMBA and mail config, etc) and carefully put them back after comparison with the freshly installed version. Modern installers tend to use just three partitions (/boot, / and swap) but I think that's not a good approach, just simple. I use more because:

- /home is separate and contains everything I've added (e.g. Java)
because this way I can reformat the other partitions, do a clean
install and not have lost any of my data. There are some post-install
tweaks needed but they're minor.

- /var is separate so that runaway logging, overflowing mailboxes or
gigantic print jobs can't fill all the available disk and interfere
with normal system operation.

- /usr is separate because I thought it seemed a good idea at the time.
In practise it just wastes space because its read-only data except
when its being upgraded.

Naming: Its best to always use fully qualified host names, e.g "host.mydomain.com". If you have your own domain, use it. Otherwise, make up something and use it within your home network behind your firewall/router. Don't use unqualified host names, especially on a home network, because this can confuse the DNS service.

Tips:

I use the bash shell. The following works for it. If you'd like the current directory to be included in the shell's search path modify PATH to include the current directory by putting this in .bash_profile:

export PATH=".:$PATH"

If you want to do this for all logins, put it in a small script in /etc/profile.d - when you login bash runs the /etc/profile script, which in turn runs all the scripts in /etc/profile.d

Use this mechanism for all your system-wide customizations and keep copies of them safe so you can drop them back in place after a reinstall.

The control panel user maintenance tool DOES encrypt passwords. You can't avoid encrypting them.

Add a comment about NEVER using root except for doing system maintenance. Doing so is asking for trouble. Besides, its not necessary: there's a useful tool called sudo that can be configured to let nominated users run specific privileged commands, access protected files, etc.

Distributions: Replace "Redhat Desktop" with "Redhat Fedora" (FCn, the free distribution) and "Redhat Enterprise Linux" (RHEL, a paid-for, supported distribution).

This is getting too long, so I'll stop now. If you want I can go further into using symlinks and /home to protect locally installed packages, which would usually be in /usr, from being blitzed by a clean install.
Take this offline if you prefer.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
.

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