Point your RSS Aggregator to AboutBSD and join the conversation, get some education on what's happening in the BSD Community, more of them. Participate in the broader community. If you have no idea what I just said, then for BSD related information, book mark AboutBSD as a destination you need to visit on a regular basis.

Another one of those 'artificial' hurdles we of the SysAdmin priesthood place between ourselves and the unwashed masses is disappearing slowly, the locked foundary of information secured behind 'leet but arcane(sic) stores such as formal papers, printed books (what's that?) and mailing lists (now that at least can be search engined?)

Don't even go anywhere near source-code when trying to explore BSD technology with 'the great unwashed.' Patch by updating your source tree? What source tree?

New System Administrators seem to be conditioned to expect a nice GUI 'click-click-click' to solve their problem, or a web forum where someone out there is dedicated to answering their questions, ASAP and at no cost.

Hey, it's not our fault that some people out there are just lazy, and if they're lazy with basic investigation, do we really think they should be entrusted with the data/information system of any organisation?

The Internet is a great repository of knowledge and disinformation, and other Operating Systems have used this (explicitly and by shear darn luck) to proseletise and augment, fix their OSs. BSD has been behind, from the perspective of desktop endusers.

Dru Lavigne has earned her credibility in the BSD community and maintains blogs i've been following closely for the past year. Dru has a new project in place to assist more people explore the world of BSD Operating Systems.

Lavigne's new project: AboutBSD helps the uninitiated by bringing together aggregated knowledge disseminations from the various BSD related sites, for example: undeadly publishing on the OpenBSD space, others publishing on NetBSD. This is great news, especially for those of us who have tunnel visioned by primarily focussing on a single technological path/project. With AboutBSD the antennaes are out again for us hangers on.

Let knowledge bring us closer, let enlightment make a better community (sic)

BSD Magazine has grown from strength to strength with really well written, edited articles.

This month is dedicated to OpenBSD, what ever dedication means, but in essence you have some nice articles targetting OpenBSD specific installs.

• Floppy Systems
• OpenBSD Mail Server

It's always good to get more documentation out there, maybe they can work together with the BSD Certification group aggregate where we can push all our documentation so that quality can be raised for everyone (writer and reader.)

Follow the link and "educate yourself" (Blinkly -- Lilo and Stitch)

Documentation Updates:

• CARP
• Firewall Validation methodologies

More importantly, maybe I don't actually know what it is I'm talking about, and some one out there can either learn more from my errors, or learn because of my errors.

This whole publishing process, of the OpenBSD notes is still not where it's supposed to be, but the workflow is cleaning up nicely and in the meanwhile am learning quite a few things.

One missing item in my menagere, is that I'm supposed to use rsync to copy these text files onto my site, but since the site is generated using countershape, the generated files are always timestamp'd later than what is on the actual web server.

The solution, was to have a git repository of the work on the server, when I've finished updating the work on my workstation, I push the updates to the repository on the server, and an automated script (together with countershape) would regenerate the site onto the 'live' server.

Unfortunately, the site is so old that too many old versions of things are on it, and I can't use this mechanism (yet.)

sshd and passwords

Updated the notes on sshd, for some reason I've stated to only allow publickey authentication, but then the example I had didn't explicitly show 'disabling password authenticaiton'

PasswordAuthentication no

Now I have to check the servers I had my offsider build to verify that disabling has been set up.

Bam bam.

update

Fortunately, my offsider/sidekick is smarter than I. He doesn't cut-n-paste, so figured that the monologue meant that he was to look for it (PasswordAuthentication) and lock it down himself.

Smart dude.

More fortunately, only one of the hosts had PasswordAuthentication at yes (but that host was behind a firewall that did not pass through ssh.) The only means of accessing that machine was through the single service it supported, or by first logging onto the firewall (PasswordAuthentication no as well as having a whitelist in pf of source hosts allowed to access ssh) then jump from there.

Whew

Enjoy it while it lasts.

We've got a number of upgrades going on, which means that since subtle changes are occurring, that we have to perform complete tests on these systems (i.e. not the hardware, but our software configurations.)

This week I'm building a tiny lab of six machines to test a roll out of OpenBSD 4.7 on one of our redundant (carp) firewalls. Since rule changes are really a good excuse to revisit how you've written your previous version, then it is a good time do a thorough review (test in and out activity etc.)

We move again to another system for pushing our diatribe to the world?

Why is there need for more options ? Some people enter a state of dysfunction when offered too many choices, others are dysfunctional because they crave the novelty and not the functionality

I'm finding some of these options just more and more fascinating to pursue ?

Strange, but these bouts of curiosity tend to be aligned with bouts of sleep deprivation and minor healt decline. I wonder if there's an association?