discuss: Linux Networking Guide
Subject:
Re: Linux Networking Guide
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
21 Nov 2004 09:18:40 -0000
Message-Id: <20041121091832.GD857@davespc>
On Sat, Nov 20, 2004 at 11:07:56PM +1100, Binh Nguyen wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Hmmm.... Got kind of carried away with writing a new guide. Anyway,
> for those not in the know I've been in the process of combining the
> ~99? networking doc's, putting them into a new guide and making sure
> that the doc is coherent. Problem is, its become rather big (about 3/4
> the size of the "Linux Dictionary" which is about 2000 pages?) and I'm
> not sure how I should split up the content anymore and whether I
> should actually get rid of some content to make it more readable and
> less intimidating. So I was wondering whether there was someone who
> would be willing to take a quick whiz at it and just look at the
> format of it? I know its still kind of rough but you should be able to
> garner some idea of what the finished product will be like from it.
I took a quick look at it and sampled a few % of it. First, you haven't
written 1500 pages since most all of it is just copied from various
other HOWTOs with some minor changes. There is likely to be a licensing
problem with doing this since some licenses say you must license it
under the same license.
One major problem is that much of what you've copied is obsolete. Sure,
one can still set up networks that way but there is better software and
in some cases, better protocols to use. I'm no expert on networks so I
just sampled stuff that I knew about.
The second major problem is that all this is not integrated and doesn't
tie in together. Some of the material is not even about networks.
Furthermore, suppose someone updates one of these howtos that you
include. Shouldn't your guide be automatically updated somehow?
So we are back to square one. We have a lot of network HOWTOs, most of
which are obsolete. It would seem that what we need instead are a lot
of up-to-date HOWTOs on various types and aspects of networks. Then we
need a guide that gives an overview of all of this, perhaps something
like Tanenbaum's textbook: Computer Networks. The overview would link
to all the other HOWTOs so one could consult them for details. All of
this is a big task to be done by many people. But one person could
start by updating one or more HOWTOs, etc.
There's also Terry Dawson's published book: Linux Network Administrators
Guide that needs updating.
Regarding the obsolete stuff. A few people might still use it and it's
important to keep for historical purposes. So a series of HOWTOs could
cover this (selectively taken from the existing HOWTOs) and it could be
just kept at a few mirror sites.
David Lawyer
> http://cvsview.tldp.org/index.cgi/LDP/guide/docbook/Linux-Networking/
>
> Thankyou,
> Binh.
