I'd like to volunteer please... :-)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 13:46, James Davis wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
> > I think the push has been for the Docs Project to produce small,
> > self-contained tutorials. Perhaps in the interest of preserving
> > continuity, the best starting point would be to think of how the
> > security guides could be broken up... perhaps into groups like
> > file/resource security, general host security, and service security
> > (with each service represented separately). I could also see general IT
> > security and incident response being covered by tutorials as well.
> 
> I was on the bus home that perhaps a good starting point would be to cover
> security through installation and the first boot. For example the
> firewall, services, user configuration tools, the choices you have and
> reasons to make your choices. After that, extending to core packages
> directly involved with security and then to secure configuration of other
> common core packages. I wasn't thinking of anything along the lines of
> "linux security" or "general computer security" at least not in the
> immediate future, I think that's too much of an under taking, and likely
> to lose momentum.

Your points are well-taken, and you should only bite off as much as you
feel it worth doing, of course. I do think that what you'll find is that
with any well-written documentation, making any salient points about a
fairly complex subject requires some groundwork... otherwise you are not
informing the reader, simply throwing esoterica at them and hoping some
of it sticks. On the other hand, the tutorial format is task-oriented. I
think it's a bit of a balancing act, and the docs project will likely
take some time to find the right tone, where the tutorials are short
enough to read but long enough to offer some insight so that the reader
is not simply following a cookbook without gaining any knowledge.

I think I was not really saying that you should feel personally
responsible for doing a large portion of the subject matter I mentioned;
it was more a way of breaking down the task into some reasonable
division. If we have an overall feeling for where each tutorial should
stop, it's easier to see a larger picture as well, such as how many such
tutorials the docs project might reasonably aim for in the long run.
Just my $0.02, of course.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE