[KLUG Members] Intro and AU-LUG

[Richard Zimmerman]

Greetings Eric,
>
>  
> Our firm proudly supports the Ubuntu philosophy and we also sell and 
> support system running Debian and Redhat based distributions.  Any 
> experiences you can bring to us are welcome.
>

I've been on the list since 2000 maybe 1999. The old hats will remember 
me. I'm that guy that used to drive up from Elkhart!

Anyhow, my experience?  First exposure was in 1995-1996 in the .78 to 
.82 kernel days. Then I moved to Indiana and started fooling with Linux 
again. Ran Red Hat 7.3 servers at work til RH abandoned the 7x series. I 
switched the servers to Debian and never looked back. HATE Ubuntu for 
only one reason. I have to sudo everything. Give me a root prompt. Y-E-S 
I know it can be switched.

Any rate, how would I rate Debian! Absolutely awesome and reliable as 
long as my fingers stay off the keyboards! <grin>

*** Disclaimer ***
BTW, do N-O-T type the following command if you are new to Linux or 
never used it. It WILL cause you to have a bad day. You have been warned!
*** Disclaimer ***

Back in 2002,  myself (and my employer) suffered three suicidal server 
crashes in three days on a Debian server due to a badly placed 'rm -rf' 
command in a script! Fortunately for me (and my job) the boss had a good 
sense of humor about the whole issue and I got really good at disaster 
recovery - QUICK! Lesson to be learned here children:

A-L-W-A-Y-S specify an absolute path when using an 'rm -rf' command!
A-L-W-A-Y-S specify an absolute path when using an 'rm -rf' command!
A-L-W-A-Y-S specify an absolute path when using an 'rm -rf' command!

Yes, it's worth repeating 3 times. Someone is always dumb enough to type 
it in! <-- It's human nature (oh, it won't happen to me!)

So, to help the inept who are tempted to use the above without looking 
up what will happen first...

rm = remove file(s)
-f = force (don't confirm, just do it)
-r = recursive (another wards, delete everything I see)

So, now that I have given a quick newbie lesson on a command that will 
ruin your weekend.

What happened in my case? I was running it from inside a nightly script 
where a directory didn't exist due to a cd (change directory) scripting 
error. The previous directory was / <slash> or aka the root directory. 
So executing 'rm -rf' while happily sitting in / (root dir) caused my 
server to commit suicide.

Fast forwarding almost 6 years now... Today, I run 6 servers in two 
organizations and two servers at home. I've got a triple boot laptop (XP 
Home, Debian and Vector Linux) and program in TCL, SQL (Postgresql), 
Rivet and HTML. In case anyone cares, Debian Etch is my flavor.

So that is my experience. Hopefully someone learns from my mistakes. One 
day I need to make the run up there again. It's been too long!

Richard aka Goose
Mishawaka, IN

/ I wonder if my old Klug shirts fit anymore???