Tom Diehl on 13 Sep 2004 02:39:02 -0000


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[PLUG] Re: Religious Questions


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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