[KLUG Members] Greetings and Introduction

[members@kalamazoolinux.org]

>Although I have attended several KLUG meetings with Richard Zimmerman, and
>have gotten some good information from following this list, I believe this
>is my first post to the KLUG general list. So, for those who are
>interested, I should probably introduce myself to the list.
>I am a biochemist by training, but I have become the one-man IS department
>for a small company (40 hosts on a TCP/IP LAN) in northern Indiana. I
>inherited a hodge-podge system of Linux servers and Win clients. My first
>official assignment as SysAdmin was to add an NT Member Server to run a
>network version of the company accounting package.
>Everything has been learn as you go, but I never seem to have the time to
>stay on one thing long enough to retain what I learn about DNS, SMTP, POP3,
>firewalls, SSL, SSH, Samba, Apache, NT, IIS, WinX, O2K, etc.

I know the feeling.

>Fortunately the essential things are mostly working. My single biggest
>annoyance is wading through lots of trivial messages in my log files. The

Such as?  syslog is quite configurable as is the verbosity level of most
applications.  

logview is a nice GNOME application for wading through logs. 

It is also pretty simple to centralize all/most of the logs on one server.  

>LAN is a lot more secure than when I started, and generally when I reach
>the point that something is working, I have to move on to something else that
>isn't working as well.
>I like the Linux things, but it reminds me of the old days of DOS where
>every program had it's own interface and quirks so every program had a
>steep learning curve. You tended to stay with a program once you learned it

Have you looked into webmin or linuxconf?  These things can make alot of the
drudgery of net/sys-admin much less annoying.

For DNS and Apache the config/control-panl/system-settings tools that come with
RH7.2 are manna from heaven.

>because you didn't want to have to take the time to learn another program
>and unlearn what you already knew. But because every program was different,
>any program you don't use for a while, you have to learn all over again
>when you come back to it.

This is actually true of *ANY* enterprise level package on *ANY* platform. 
Complexity of operation means complexity of configuration,  there is no escape.

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