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Date:      Mon, 15 Apr 1996 08:11:39 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert N Watson <rnw+@andrew.cmu.edu>
To:        Brill Pappin <brillp@nation.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: help for a "dos'sy"
Message-ID:  <0lQXnv200YUf021VA0@andrew.cmu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <316FD3EA.414@nation.org>
References:  <316FD3EA.414@nation.org>

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There are two parts to this email -- first, a question of minor
importance, and second, an attempt to answer your question.  

First: there are some funny codes in your email, I was wondering what
email package you used, and whether you knew if it uses RTF or etc.  I'm
curious about what the codes are produced by, as I have seen them in
quite a few emails/posts, and they probably get inserted by some common
mailer that I don't use :).  

With regards to your question -- I would personally invest in "Unix
System Administration Essentials" by O'Reilly and Associates
(publisher).  Release 2 if possible.  It is a really good book that
covers most everything one would need to know.  As a dos user who was
thrown into Unix sysadmin without warning, and had to support a user
base of 300-400 in two weeks time (that was 3 years ago) it was kind of
a shock. :)  Fortunately BSD came preinstalled (BSDI in this case, which
is a commercial flavor of FreeBSD) and I had a tech support number, but
it was a long road with no help.  Take a look through the FreeBSD
handbook on www.freebsd.org, keep in mind the "man" command which
provides some limited information about the purpose and incantations of
a command, eg.,

man ls
man man

etc.

Also, use the "more" command to view the config files in /etc, they gave
me a feel for what does what in unix just by virtue of seeing a lot of
the settings.  so:

cd /etc
more *

might help.  Press space to go down a page, q to quit at any time, and
:n to skip to the next file.  If this is too basic, my apologies :). 
Keep in mind that unix, being multi-user, is heavily oriented around
mediating system resources and services, and that will show up a lot in
anything you do on the system -- eg., file rights, user communication,
etc.

Feel free to email me (and presumably questions@freebsd.org) with
questions you have :).

Robert Watson
rnw+@andrew.cmu.edu



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