sata raid

[Peter Whittaker]

On Wed, 2007-02-05 at 23:15 -0400, Chris Patten wrote:
> Wow Peter, great answer.  I really appreciate the email.

Thanks! My pleasure....

> I am a network admin for a medium size company, 100% windows, the
> whole linux world is new to me. I find the learning blocks to be a
> real pain though, fun yes, but a pain as well.  Do you have any
> suggestions for a quicker way to learn rather than me staying up later
> than I should each night hacking way my through conf samba files! and
> the sort...I haven't found any "windows professionals convert to
> linux" type weekend crash courses, know of any in the Toronto area? 

I don't, I'm not terribly up on Linux training.

Personally, I wouldn't go that way: The Windows and Unix/Linux paradigms
are so different, I cannot help but feel the best thing to do is to
approach Linux on its on terms and learn it from the ground up. Your
Windows admin knowledge *will* be valuable, because it has given you
comfort and expertise around the hardware and around an OS, but it will
not map perfectly (or may not map well at all), given the fundamental
differences in the OS's.

I'd push my Windows admin knowledge off to the side, get a book like
Sobell's Practical Guide, sit down at the keyboard and work through page
by page. (That's how I learned Unix 17ish years ago - with his Practical
Guide to UNIX - 3 days, cover to cover, I was set.)

At that the end of that exercise, you'll understand the organization of
a Linux system. NOW bring your Windows admin knowledge out, and start
comparing the Windows way to the Linux way: You'll be in a position to
determine the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Perhaps take one of the "Hack" books and start picking hacks at random:
Read the hack title, decide how you'd do it under Windows, take a stab
at figuring how you'd do it under Linux, then read/do the text.

But that's me: We all learn differently. I'm a "dive in and break stuff"
kind of guy (except when I'm diving, funny that! :->), I like to get
inside and find my way around.

The one thing you'll find, though, is that hacking at the CLI won't
always give you the results you expect when you run a GUI-based system
like Ubuntu. Take power management, for example: The sleep.sh and
hibernate.sh scripts attempt to detect GDM, and if it is running, they
exit silently, letting Gnome handle power management and event
responses. You can hack the scripts 'til dawn, and change nothing,
because of that. (Unless you hack out that check, of course, but then
you might have two systems responding to the same event, good luck!)

Likewise, if you have hacked certain files, GUI tools won't behave as
you expect. I'm thinking of network-manager, which ignores any
interfaces explicitly configured in /etc/network/interfaces.

Welcome to the firehose, I hope you're thirsty! :->

>  By the way, I went to school in Ottawa, Algonquin.  Go sens!

Be Red!

(My daughter wrote GO SENS GO Send the Devils Golfing! on my office
whiteboard, and Neiler's gap toothed grin stares down at me from above
my PotC calendar, yeah, I've got it bad. :->)

pww

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