Saturday, October 23, 2010

Friday (Saturday) Post

What I did this week. This week Henry and I played around with tcpdump. While we didn't know what each packet meant being able to see what kind of communication and when it was occurring is something that is pretty useful. We noticed that there were ARP requests were being sent out and those machines running sugar kept contacting other machines which I assume is part of the LAN discovery.

I also created a google doc that has a list of all the phobias we used for our hostnames. At the moment I don't see the doc being very useful since if you need to add or change a phobia you have to jump into the dhcpd.conf anyways so everyone will see your changes. Of course documentation outside of the config is nice though. I'm hoping to add to it (maybe MAC?) so that when people need something one person will be like "Hey guys let's just consult Steve's Google Doc" and then the other guy will be like "Yeah!" and then high fives are issued.

Lastly started reading on fdisk in the LPIC. One thing I take issue with this whole certification is you're left without docs. Now I realize that this occurs with every test but it's still something that annoys me. When I first used fdisk I never knew how to use it but the man pages helped me out. With LPIC you're not just expected to know what the command does but you have to know what a certain parameter does or what you need. I can understand if they ask you how to do something common like create a tar.gz which you should know by heart now but Henry and I were looking at the man pages for a command (can't remember which one) and whoever made it must have had an evil sense of humor. There were six parameters that triggered different results BUT the way they were issued was the next parameter had another t. For example, sudo makemasandwich -t would tell you the time when making the sandwich, -tt would add some mayonnaise, -ttt would get the newspaper for you and compliment you on your hair and -tttt would launch Skynet. My long complaint is it's unrealistic to expect someone to remember this. People remember what they use often and that's it. So while I may learn this stuff now if I don't use it often it's a waste of time. I know that this won't get me out of doing the work but it's nice to rant. Whether the LPIC forces me to learn this kind of stuff will be seen.

1 comment:

  1. It's nice to have a good rant, now and then, so I'm glad you got it out of your system ;-) To the degree that LPIC is testing obscure switches on Unix commands, your criticism is more valid. My understanding is that they try to focus on the most common command options. To the degree they succeed will be open to debate, I'm sure, but you have to live with whatever they have anyway :-(

    Again, please try to make journaling a *daily* habit. It is less painful and more beneficial that way.