[K12OSN] nfs problems, continued

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 11:50, Huck wrote:

> This is the sort of "Meat and Potatoes" I've been looking to find for
> years.
> Could you by chance recommend a book or two where in-depth information
> like this can be found?

Ummm, you could read the 'release notes' for several versions of unix
for each update since the mid-80's....   Or if you are in a hurry and
don't care so much about differences from other versions the most
useful current documentation is probably Red Hat's own.  I don't think
fedora has an equivalent yet so
https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/
may be the best you can do.

> Yeah it's nice to know the 'short answer'...but it doesn't allow one to
> understand WHAT is going on...and why.

The interesting thing about unix/linux is that the underlying
mechanisms are extremely simple and elegant (which sometimes makes
the higher-level things complex...).  For example, every program
except 'init' starts out as a copy of it's parent program, inheriting
open files, uid/gid, etc. Once you understand the parts that
everything has in common the many exceptions become easier to
manage.  In a similar way, it also helps to spend a while learning
how the shell parses and processes your command line, doing
variable substitution, wild card expansion, i/o redirection, etc.
before trying to understand the man pages of all the other programs
which have those operations already done before they are started. For
example if you see 'file...' in a man page, meaning one or more
file names, you'd likely actually type a wild-card pattern and
let the shell expand the list the program will see.

The other nice thing about learning unix basics is that I did it
20 years ago and most of it is still useful today.  By contrast,
almost everything I've learned about Microsoft products has been
how to work around bugs that change every year.  Does anyone
remember what version of MSDOS was the first to recognize more
than 32 Megs in a disk partition - or which hardware vendors added
their own hacks to earlier versions? (Repeat for 2.1 gigs, 8 gigs,
32 gigs, 120 gigs, etc...).

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com