discuss: A HOWTO mentioned in Shon Harris's CISSP book
Subject:
Re: A HOWTO mentioned in Shon Harris's CISSP book
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
6 Apr 2005 15:37:43 -0000
Message-Id: <20050406014320.GB4689@lafn.org>
On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 10:27:34PM -0700, Saqib Ali wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Recently there has been lot of discussion on the value that TLDP
> provides to the Linux Documentation domain, and quality of
> documentation.
>
> I thought I should mention the following:
>
> Shon Harris in her books "All-in-one CISSP Certification" references
> the following HOWTO:
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PPP-HOWTO/ on Page 427 of her book.
>
> This goes to show that TLDP staff and the HOWTO authors must be doing
> something right. :)
>
> So Kudos to Corwin Light-Williams and Joshua Drake who wrote the
> HOWTO, and to the TLDP Staff.
It's ironic that I think that the PPP-HOWTO, which hasn't been updated
in 5 years, is a good example of an out-of-date HOWTO. It doesn't
mention the PPP dialers: pppconfig, gnome-ppp, or modem lights. There
may be more.
I wouldn't give these two people kudos until I checked what they
contributed. The original author of this HOWTO, Robert Hart, may be
the one that contributed the most. I sampled a little of what was
likely added to his original and found some errors. There are lots of
examples where someone takes over someone else's HOWTO and doesn't do a
through job of revision.
Today, ppp is used for VPN, or at least it's classified as ppp. For
example there's file: /etc/ppp/pptpd-options where pptp is
Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. LDP doesn't cover this topic
adequately and there are lots of docs people have put on the Internet
explaining it but not as well as a good HOWTO could. The PPP-HOWTO
should either cover these topics or point to a HOWTO that does.
That's one reason I think we need subject specialists: to find out
what we need to cover and then try to find people to write it.
David Lawyer
