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Very often it is not even necessary to connect to the Internet
to find the information you need. Chapter 19
contains a description of most of the documentation on a LINUX
distribution.
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It is however essential to get the most up to date information
where security and hardware driver support is 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 news, reading
newsgroups and subscribing to mailing lists are essential parts
of a system administrators role.
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The metalab.unc.edu FTP site is considered the primary
site for free software the world over. It is mirrored in almost
every country that has a significant IT infrastructure.
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Our local South Africa mirror's are ftp.is.co.za in the
directory /linux/sunsite, and also somewhere on the site
ftp.sdn.co.za.
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It is advisable to browse around these ftp sites. 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. 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 mirror of the
metalab. This is known as the sunsite
mirror because it used to be called metalab.unc.edu. It
contains enumerable UNIX packages in source and binary form,
categorised in a directory tree. For instance, mail clients
have their own directory with many mail packages inside.
metalab is the place where a new developer can host
some 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
stable16.1 and beta16.2 kernel versions and
kernel patches.
- The various distributions. RedHat, Debian and possibly
other popular distributions will be mirrored.
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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.
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The FTP site is how you will download free software. Often, maintainers
will host their software on a a web site, but every popular package will
almost always have an FTP site where versions are persistently stored.
An example is lava.obsidian.co,za in the directory
/pub/linux/cooledit where the author's own Cooledit
package is distributed -- the layout is typical of an FTP site.
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Most users should already be familiar with using a web browser.
You should also become familiar with the concept of a
web search. This is when you point your web browser to
a popular search engine like http://infoseek.go.com/,
http://www.altavista.com/ or
http://www.yahoo.com/ and search for a particular key
word. 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.
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The web sites in the FAQ (excluding the list of known
distributions) should all be consulted to get a overview on some
of the primary sites of interest to LINUX users.
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Especially important is that you keep up to do with the latest
LINUX news. I find the Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/ excellent for this. 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.
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Fresh Meat http://frshmeat.net/ is a web site devoted
to new software releases. You will find new or updated packages
uploaded every few hours or so.
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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.
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Realistically though, a new LINUXweb site is created every week;
almost anything prepended or append to ``linux'' is
probably a web site already.
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A mailing list is a special address that when posted to,
automatically sends email a long list of other addresses. One
usually subscribes to a mailing list by sending some especially
formatted email, or requesting a subscription from the mailing
list manager.
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Once you have subscribed to a list, any email you post to the
list will be sent to every other subscriber, and every other
subscribers posts to the list will be sent to you.
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There are mostly three types of mailing lists. Those over the
majordomo type, those of the listserv type, and
those of the *-request type.
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To subscribe to the majordomo type variety send mail
message to majordomo@<machine> with no subject and
a one line message:
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subscribe <mailing-list-name>
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This will subscribe you to the mailing list
<mailing-list-name>@<machine>, where messages
are posted to.
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Do the same for listserv type lists, by sending the same
message to listserv@<machine>.
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For instance, if you are an administrator for any machine that is exposed
to the Internet you should get on bugtraq. Send an email
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to listserv@netspace.org, and become one of the tens of
thousands of users that read and report security problems about
LINUX.
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To unsubscribe to a list is just as simple, send an email message,
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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>.
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These can be subscribed to 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 will remove you from the list.
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Once again, never send subscribe or unsubscribe messages to the mailing
list itself..
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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.
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The client software you will use to read a newsgroup is called a
news reader. rtin is a popular text mode reader,
while netscape is graphical.
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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, etc. There are many other linux newsgroups
devoted to various LINUX issues.
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Newsgroups servers are big hungry beasts. They form a tree like
structure on the Internet. When you send mail to a newsgroups 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.
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Whats the difference between a newsgroup and a mailing list? The
advantage of a newsgroup is that you don't have to download the
messages your 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.
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Why not just put the mailing list on a web page? If you did,
then everyone in the world will 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, hence you
retrieve mail over a faster link and save Internet traffic.
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An indispensable source of information for serious
administrators or developers are the RFC's. RFC stands for
Request For Comments. RFC's are Internet standards
written by authorities to define everything about Internet
communication. Very often documentation will refer to RFC's16.3.
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metalab.unc.edu <ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/rfc/>
(and mirrors) has the complete RFC's archived for download. There are about
2500 of them. The index file rfc-index.txt is probably
where you should start. It has entries like:
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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.
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