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Re: Debian, too easy?



Quoting Leo Spalteholz <leo@thewoodpecker.ca>:

> I just thought of something while setting up port forwarding on my 
> server....
> First I searched google on how to do something like that and came 
> across a howto.  I figured thats great and tried to work through it 
> but it was pretty technical and I didn't really have a clue what I 
> was doing.  Then I figured there must be some magic debian script 
> that will set it up for me and sure enough, ipmasq does exactly what 
> I want, no knowledge required.

Hi,
ipmasq is a great tool for setting up workstations to access internet
via your debian box. Glad you found it.

> 
> This is all great and thats the main reason I use debian but am I 
> actually learning anything? 

OK, now that you got it working, but you didn't learn anything, go back and 
remove ipmasq and setup it up manually using iptables. This will teach you how 
ipmasq works and what it actually does. There are tons of debian packages that 
are like this. Another example might be adduser. You could actually add a user 
without running the adduser command. You would have to jump around the system 
adding the account to the right files, creating home dir, mail spool etc etc.
but its do-able.

 I've been running debian on my desktop 
> and server for over a year now and know how to configure it quite 
> well but I still dont really feel I know linux.  There are so many 
> debian tools that automagically take care of system administration 
> that I think I would be lost without them.  While I wouldnt want to 
> give all this up I also wouldn't want to find that what I know about 
> linux is totally useless for any distro other than debian.
Debian is a great linux distro for learning linux IMO. No flashy/fancy gui's to 
get in the way, but they'er available if you want them. This is why I don't 
like using utils like Webmin, I'd much rather ssh into the box, and run
# adduser username
to add an account from the command line. Thats just me though.
  
> 
> I really dont have much experience with other linux distros so maybe 
> its not that different but it feels like I'm in a pretty 
> debian-specific world.  
> 
> What do you think, could I get away with putting Linux on my resume or 
> is my debian experience too limited?
Nah, If you can mangle thru Debian, you can mangle thru anything.
Put Linux on your resume, but when they hire you as a sys admin for Redhat 
boxes, convert them all to debian afterwards... :) 

Cheers,
Mike


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