[Gllug] Newbie asks: how to learn?

[Doug Winter]

On Fri 20 Dec james at soon.co.uk wrote:
> *Always have an escape route.
> Sooner or later you will pole-axe your system. I know it sounds boring
> but try and always have available, a bootable CD/floppy, a working
> Internet connection and a backed-up of valuable data.

I would add to this that in keeping backups of configuration
files is vital.  It's one of those really boring bits of sysadmin
discipline that really pays off.  If you do this, one day you will be
very, very pleased that you did.

Every time you do this:

$ /bin/su -
# cd /etc
# vi foo

You should think "hang on, i might break something", quit vi and do

# cp foo.conf foo.conf.2002-12-20
# vi foo.conf

(or whatever today's date is)

then you can break foo.conf to your hearts content, you have a permanent
audit trail of what you did.

I cannot count the number if times I've had to back out changes later
because some random thing unexpectedly broke, and backing things out by
memory is *hard*.

The RCS tools 'ci' and 'co' are extremely useful for this too - rtfm.

Cheers,

Doug.


-- 
Originally, a 'geek' was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens.
key 1024D/6973E2CF print 2C95 66AD 1596 37D2 41FC 609F 76C0 A4EC 6973 E2CF
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