From owner-freebsd-doc Tue Oct 17 10:23:54 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from virtual.sysadmin-inc.com (lists.sysadmin-inc.com [209.16.228.140]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DD9BB37B4C5 for ; Tue, 17 Oct 2000 10:23:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from 98wkst ([10.10.1.71]) by virtual.sysadmin-inc.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id NAA05163; Tue, 17 Oct 2000 13:27:52 -0400 Reply-To: From: "Peter Brezny" To: "'Jason C. Wells'" Cc: Subject: RE: How To's Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 13:23:52 -0400 Message-ID: <000201c0385f$05d88b60$47010a0a@fire.sysadmininc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook CWS, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-Reply-To: X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Thanks jason, I respect your views, and all in all, i agree that hte documentation for freebsd is a lot better than that for linux. However, when you're trying to get something done, and you don't necessarily have the time or patience to read 15 pages of ipfw implementation procedures for an advanced firewall, and only need a simple implementation (like the on provided in rc.firewall) it would really be helpful to have some form of short step by step, "here's how you get the thing to run" _before_ you get into the hard core heavy duty "this is how the thing works in technical detail" which is what i feel the documentation for freebsd realy does well. I think this is one of the primary reasons linux has taken off faster than the obviously superior bsd based free os's. and perhaps that's a good thing, fewer intelligent users = fewer intelligent hackers? but that's a naieve approach for sure. short step by step "here's how to get it running" documentation would do me a lot of good. Peter Brezny SysAdmin Services, Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Jason C. Wells [mailto:jcwells@nwlink.com] Sent: Monday, October 16, 2000 5:38 PM To: Peter Brezny Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How To's On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Peter Brezny wrote: > Why don't we have a how too link on the freebsd main page? Because we don't have Howtos, not in any official capacity. > I've not been able to find a single document that gives you the > bare bones of what you need to do to enable ipfw. I found it without much trouble. First I clicked "Handbook" on the home page. Then I clicked firewalls. http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/firewalls.html Hmmm, there is one small piece missing on this page to be complete and thorough. It could be that the author felt that starting ipfw at boot was better documented in the "boot" documentation. Ahhh, there it is: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/boot-init.html It tells me to read /etc/defaults/rc.conf. You should be able to take it from there. I feel it would be better for the firewall doc to add a sentence about starting ipfw at boot. > Please consider putting together a HOW TO page and putting a link to it on > the main freebsd site under documentation. We need it. No. We don't. More aptly stated, we don't have documentation named "Howto", therefore we don't have a link. Documents called Howto do exist outside of the documentation project. I personally, would prefer to see those docs rolled into the official documentation. I am sure lots of people are working hard at just that sort of thing. At the root of it all, Howto is just a name for how the Linux world _doesn't_ do documentation. FreeBSD does have documentation. One simply needs to learn what we call it. Thank you, Jason C. Wells To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message