Complete noob...

[Daniel T. Staal]

On Mon, August 7, 2006 6:26 am, George Goodman said:

>> I recommend printed matter.  The O'Reilly "nutshell" series is pretty
decent.  GG's boss will be a good boss and cut him about $200 to go
book-shopping.
>
> The order is already in the mail (cool boss):
>
> "Secure Architectures with OpenBSD" Brandon Palmer;
> "Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security" Yanek Korff;
> "Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the Practical Paranoid" Michael W. Lucas;
"Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, 2nd Edition" Jacek Artymiak;
>
> Should help me get my feet wet...

See if he can swing you a subscription (or get it yourself) to Safari:
http://safari.oreilly.com/
It will let you search and preview the books, get a discount when you buy
them, and you'll be able to check some out and read them online.  (Great
for 'projects', where you need a book to set something up but won't need
it afterwards.)

>> It is vicious to start up X at boot time for the new user.
>
> I already decided "no X" on the servers, unless someone can give me a
complelling reason to do it. Desktops are likely to be hardened Ubuntu
at this stage... still researching.

My first few OpenBSD machines *couldn't* run X.  ;)  No reason to use it
on a server if you can get comfortable with the comandline.

It is a good exercise to go through once: Setting it up takes different
knowledge of the system then you are likely to use often elsewhere.

>> No vi?  No unix.
>
> I'm on to it, geez, this is not a minor undertaking :)

My advice would be to not bother to learn every in and out of vi.  You
probably don't need it, if you have a decent text editor on you desktop
computer.

But you do need enough vi to do basic editing of config files.  No
questions asked on that.

Oh, and that advice about printing out the manual for ed?  Gold.  You'd be
*amazed* and the trouble you can get yourself into and out of with that...
 ;)



OpenBSD has a learning curve, I admit, and finding where to start in the
documentation at the beginning is hard.  But it is actually one of the
better systems to learn unix *on*, and the documentation is there,
accessible, and complete on all topics, unlike some systems.  Sometimes it
just takes a bit to understand how to read the docs.

And, you've found the best help: this list!  I look forward to more good
questions from you.  ;)

Oh, on other things you have mentioned: I'd also start reading up on
PostgreSQL if I were you, as it sounds like something you are going to be
needing.  I haven't tried Qmail, but there are tutorials for replacing
Sendmail with various other MTA's around.  (My preference is Postfix, but
it's just a preference.)

Welcome!

Daniel T. Staal

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