[Cialug] New Linux User orientation?

[Matt Stanton]

Morris Dovey wrote:
> Matt Breitbach wrote:
>> Generally, I need to make some modifications to CentOS systems and 
>> manage
>> them once we have installed Cpanel on them.
>>
>> One of my main goals is to get all of the user files on to our iSCSI 
>> system
>> since storage is tight on our blade.  The folders that will need to 
>> be moved
>> are /home /var and /usr.  From what I've seen moving just the /home 
>> folder,
>> I'm probably going to run into some circular dependencies by moving 
>> /var and
>> /usr - IE - lots of drivers appear to be in /var, but if I mount an 
>> iscsi
>> device and bind /var to a mount point of /iscsi/var, it won't be 
>> available
>> until networking is initialized and iSCSI services are started, many of
>> which probably reside on /var.
>>
>> Past the initial installation and configuration, there are probably 
>> going to
>> be a lot of day-to-day headaches that I'll need to know where things are
>> typically stored at, easy search methods, etc.
>>
>> I've done a lot of this before, but I haven't done it enough to have it
>> committed to long-term memory.  IE - I know how to use grep, but I don't
>> remember all of the switches and what they do.  I don't have any clue 
>> what
>> the shortcuts for VI are, and as such will be installing a different 
>> text
>> editor, as I have no desire to learn VI.  I can configure networking, 
>> and
>> can muddle my way through things, but I'd love to have a desk 
>> reference that
>> gives me something within arms reach that has lots of good information.
>
> This context helps a lot. :)
>
> I can suggest two good references - and I'm certain that others here 
> can  do better...
>
> 'man' is the quickest way I know of to look up answers to questions 
> for standard utilities like grep and vi. It's incredibly faster than 
> even just reaching for a paper reference.
>
> The second reference is, of course, this list - to backup the online 
> capability of man. I don't have any sysadmin background (and do 
> relatively little sysadmin work) but the collective expertise here, in 
> combination with short response times, has "knocked my socks off" 
> fairly frequently.
>
> (I feel much the same about vi - and, because most of my activity 
> involves writing code, have settled on nedit as my normal text editor 
> - but everyone has their favorite editor.)
>
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>   
I only just recently got my linux server running the way I wanted it to, 
so I am in no way able to be considered any sort of expert on anything 
linux... That being said, my recommendation for a command-line text 
editor is the super-easy-to-use deal distributed with debian and ubuntu 
(and probably several other distros, though vi is pretty much 
ubiquitous):  nano.  The first caveat you'll learn to deal with when 
using nano to edit config files is that you'll pretty much always want 
to use the -w option, which disables word wrap (maybe I'm doing 
something wrong, but there is one config file in particular that word 
wrap in nano mangles, but I can't remember what it is... something to do 
with email or mysql).  It gives you a list of all the ctrl-char commands 
at the bottom of the screen, so you don't end up lost like I do in vi.

Being in a production environment while trying to learn the ins and outs 
of linux is a much different situation than I have ever been in, as all 
my experience with linux has been hobby-related.  I tend to sift through 
the ubuntu forums a lot just looking for posts that are even relative to 
the current release of ubuntu for what I'm trying to do, so you really 
have to be able to filter out all the stuff that is either out of date 
or just plain wrong.  CentOS is probably a better distro to be searching 
the internet for information about since it is geared more towards a 
commercial environment (fewer users just 'playing' with it).  I have 
seen a cheat-sheet of many of the most useful console commands floating 
about at the LUG mettings, so you might ask someone where to find that, 
and for all the more in-depth stuff, you can't go wrong with the 
recommendations of the guys on this list.