On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:32:34 +0300, Mikhail Zotov <e-boogie blah@blah
yandex . ru> wrote:

>Ladies and gentlemen, folks, fellow slackers,
>
>We are going to begin a new project (tentatively and very modestly
>called "The Slack World"). The main aim of the project is to fill
>a few gaps that we see in covering Slackware-related information by
>other resources.
>
>
>We would very much like to hear your opinions, ideas, suggestions.
>We also invite volunteers to join the project. Last but not least, we
>would very much like to receive your articles, tips, links, etc. as soon
>as the project is up and you like it. :-)


I would like to make a suggestion or two. Add a section on the next
steps you need to take after the installation has completed to
configure the various servers and applications to actually work. For
example:

1. At various times I installed slack 7, 9.0, 10.0 and 10.1 with
various combinations of Apache, PHP and MySQL. What do I have to do to
actually get all three to work together? (Should I even install them
from the CD, or just download and install them from source?) There are
several configuration changes that need to be made, but just having a
list of those would be much better than the current state of having to
wade through all three source packages to find just the right
documents to tell me what has to be changed and where.

2. What are all of the steps necessary to configure a samba workgroup,
both on multiple Slackware boxen and Win9x, ME, etc.? Not only do you
have to edit smb.conf, but also lmhosts, add users, passwords etc.
Then set up CUPS, dhcpd or dnsmasq, etc. They all have to work
together, but I could not find any instructions on how to get them
coordinated. Keep in mind that the servers do not have XWindows
installed, so many of the "wizards" are not available.

3. I have one network printer (LJ5 w/JetDirect) that will be shared
between several Linux and Windows computers, using samba and CUPS. How
should I configure it; so each computer talks directly to the printer,
or with one acting as a print server and all others spooling into it?
What is the difference in setup between the spool server and the other
computers? (Specific steps to configure CUPS on multiple computers to
share a printer would also be useful.)

4. I have one computer (Slackware 3.5?) with 2 NICs acting as a NAT
firewall (ipfwadm). I have no services running on that computer. I
have another server (slack 10.1) on my side running dnsmasq for both
dns and dhcp. There are another seven computers running a mix of
Slackware, Win98SE and WinME. Roadrunner assigns the external NIC in
the twcny.rr.com domain. I use bob.net as my internal domain. How do I
configure samba, dnsmasq, etc. so that the two domains will not
collide?

5. How do you install and configure the LISa smb browser? There is
already a lisa in the Slackware 10.x installation, but it appears to
be a KDE graphics utility, not Samba.

6. How can I manage multiple Slackware systems short of keeping a
keyboard and monitor on every one, or a KVM switch? (Win98SE doesn't
play well with a KVM switch on the mouse port. The driver frequently
gets confused and it has to be rebooted via the keyboard.)

A post installation troubleshooting section:

1. Why is my Slack 10.1/KDE box always looking for a Sony CDU-535
drive? syslog shows that module sbpcd-0 runs several times an hour,
apparently searching for that missing drive. I can't figure out what
is triggering it, nor how to stop it. I don't have an SB card in the
box. modprobe.conf and modules.conf are both empty. What else from
Pat's IDE kernel does not match my hardware? Where do I modify the
module selection to better match it?

Another section on how to switch from one package to another would be
very helpful:

1. Now that MySQL has priced themselves out of the distributed DB
market, what steps need to be taken to switch my servers all over to
PostgreSQL? That includes the steps to modify Apache and PHP, as well
as backing up the current data and import it into Postgres.

2. How do you switch from dhcpd to dnsmasq?

All of these are current or past projects on my home network. I have
worked out answers to some of the above that appear to work most of
the time. But I don't always understand why they work, or don't, as
the case may be. Even pointers to better documents than are on the
CD's woud be helpful. I did search on Google, but it was less than
useful. Their current scheme for prioritizing hits is worse than none
in many cases.

Yes, I am getting ready to replace the firewall. That 486/100 has been
a stable machine for a long time, and it will be difficult to
dismantle it. It was the very first custom built computer I purchased.
But I have a P-II/100 almost ready to drop in its place. That will
increase the RAM from 24MB to 256MB so I can switch to a CD boot and
eliminate the hard drive.

And if anyone can point me to information about why Knoppix 3.7 won't
boot on a Dell Dimension 4100, I would appreciate it. It keeps looking
for scd0, but the CD is in hdd.

Thank you,

Bob McConnell
N2SPP