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07/18/2003 Entry: "Need sleep... head full of tech..." Bleah... I hate insomnia. I have had three hours sleep. I even remember which three hours. Midnight to 1am, 3am - 4am, and 6:15 - 7:15am. Hooray for stomach problems. I got a lot of reading done, though. Some e-mail... I go for RHCE Training (Red Hat Linux) starting July 28th. It's in Manassas. I have no idea how to get there, but I'll figure out something. Someone who shall remain nameless secretly snuck me a copy of his training manual (he got his RHCE last year), so I'd know what to expect. This has proved to be very helpful, because I found out I know about 50% like the back of my hand already (setup, Samba, networking, and so on), and found 25% of it to be "wow, I was wondering if they had a command for that!" The rest are like LDAP, NIS, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, and a few other services I don't know how to set up, which they don't seem to spend a whole lot of time on. I am still nervous about the exam, though. It's an in-your-face lab exam, which I should do well in, but it's on a time limit, which is not my forte, especially since you have barely enough time to get everything done *including* the install. I am setting up 2 Red Hat systems at my house for practice. I hope Slackware I got my "Absolute OpenBSD" book yesterday, which I read when I got sick of Red Hat. I am glad, because this book tells you a LOT of stuff "under the hood" and "behind the scenes," and right away was worth the money because in the first chapter that talked about installing OpenBSD, I may have solved my problems of "why do my disk drives suddenly go bad?" I suspect they weren't going bad, but I set the root partition over 504mb, which is a no-no with older machines (I should have known that). Glad I didn't throw them out. One of the things that surprised me was that in the beginning, the author, Michael Lucas, tells you that OpenBSD people are generally unfriendly, non-supportive and often aloof, and this is normal. It even goes on to explain "it's by those who know for those who know and they don't feel the need to kowtow down to newbies," but I suspect the author was just a little bit upset by this. I can picture him having to write this book (he also wrote a great book about FreeBSD called "Absolute BSD: The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD"), and coming from a FreeBSD hippie-happy-lovefest to the dark and bitter alleys of hardened system admins who tell you the world is a horrible place, and get used to it! Bluh! I think this is total crap. I understand if you get mail going "OMG i have to set up an obsd box in thre hours please help OMG WTF iz a port.gz?!?!" that you hit the delete button before you even get past the header. But I have also seen a lot of lazy "RTFM" elitist snobs act all high horse for legitimate questions in online help forums for that purpose. If the operating system wasn't so cool and well-designed, I would have ditched them faster than I ditched Amigas in the late 1980s. Rudeness is bad, no matter what the reason or "culture." I also got Richard Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher," to replace my old copy which has been missing since two moves ago. I didn't read this yet, because all this tech and science will give me a headache. The cover and format is newer than my old one, and it doesn't have a torn and taped cover like my old one did. I also got Laurie Notaro's new book, "Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood," and I am about a third of the way through that. It makes for a good interruption when you can't sleep, and you have been reading tech manuals all day. I am going to sleep like a drunken teen cheerleader after a kegger party when I get home, I am telling you right now.