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[PLUG] Re: Religious Questions
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On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Tobias DiPasquale wrote:
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> On Sep 12, 2004, at 6:32 PM, Ron Mansolino wrote:
> > The postal fairies left a spindle of cd-rs under my mailbox, so I've
> > been d/ling Fedora core 2. (3Mps from duke.edu-> Comcast :)
>
> Nice! Yeah, Duke's got a great pipe.
>
> > So I need to make some decisions. I assume I'll have to pick window
> > management stuff. I've never been lucky with FreeBSD; aside from X
> > and Netscape I don't have a lot of experience with all the GUI stuff.
> > I'm mostly interested in learning things I'll need to support in the
> > workplace, so I'm curious as to what is used in corporate deployments.
> > (It seems that the clueful people prefer Debian, but I see Red Hat
> > more often when a job announcement mentions a specific distribution).
>
> Samba, NFS, OpenLDAP. That's the kind of thing most often used and its
> used because it integrates with legacy stuff like Windows and Solaris.
> You'd do well to check that out. Debian is nice, but with the inclusion
> of Yum and APT in RedHat, its lost its advantages in my mind and I'd go
> with RedHat or SuSE, especially if you want to run software from the
> 90's. Debian's release cycle to stable is balls slow and no one's
> forcing you to upgrade your RH installation if you're concerned about
> stability. I know I'm going to get flamed for this opinion, but we ran
> Debian for years and are now switching to RedHat because of the above
> concerns (not to mention the fact that you can find more people who
> know RedHat).
>
> Plus, its _MUCH_ easier to make custom RPMs than it is to make custom
> dpkgs (Debian's package format). I learned how to package software with
> RPM in a few hours (two days ago, in fact); Debian has 5 different
> places for information on how to make dpkgs and they're all wrong in
> some way(s) or another.
Never tried .debs but rpms are not too bad to make. In addition there are
a bunch of 3rd party yum/apt repositories amking quality packages now days.
> > What about firewall/security packages? My windows pc is pretty secure,
> > but I'd rather put it behind something so I don't have to worry so
> > much.
> > I've been lucky with tcpwrappers so far, but I should learn proper
> > proxy,
> > firewall & all of that. Again, what am I likely to run into out in the
> > field?
>
> iptables can't be beat for firewalling and pretty much anyone using
> Linux for network security is already using this. There's a great
> tutorial for iptables here:
>
> http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/
You might want to look at firewll builder, firestarter, shorewall, etc. I use
firewall builder (fwbuilder.org) here and I am very happy with it. For a small
fee the author will even build a windoze version of firewall builder for you.
If you have the ability to compile windoze programs yourself it is free. The
source is gpl'd.
> Once your good with the above stuff, hit http://lartc.org/ for some
> really advanced stuff that you can do with the free tools provided with
> every Linux distro.
>
> > About mail: I'm familiar with sendmail and qmail, but I'd like to
> > check out
> > spamassassin, which one is better at integrating with that?
>
> sendmail. sendmail is better at integrating with everything than qmail,
> b/c qmail's author refuses to make any changes to it whatsoever.
> However, I would recommend Postfix; its faster and more secure than
> sendmail and also integrates nicely with a number of anti-spam (SA) and
> anti-virus (ClamAV) packages, as well as not a few mailing list
> managers (mailman).
For the reasons mentioned above and others Postfix is IMO way better then
sendmail or qmail.
> > Also, has anyone played with this:
> > http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
> > It looks like it's got all the audio/midi stuff I would want to
> > install in
> > one package. I can't get the hang of writing music with a mouse, but
> > for some
> > odd reason, scripting seems like the way to go for some things. *shrug*
>
> Can't say that I have. Sorry :(
>
> > What else should I look out for (or beware of)?
>
> CUPS (http://www.cups.org/) is notoriously hard to configure, so
> definitely get some practice with that in as many situations as you can
> muster. High-end laser printers seem to work well with CUPS, but
> printers that can't broadcast their own configuration are sometimes a
> pain to get working and shared with CUPS. Having said that, CUPS is
> still the best printing software for Linux today.
Had a look at the config tools that come with Fedora/Red Hat lately?
Assuming a supported printer, CUPS is a walk in the park. Run the
system-config-printer thingy and your printer should "just work"
HTH,
Tom
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