Re: [cobalt-users] RaQ technical software manual?

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Fantom wrote:

> It's not really the Linux that I'm looking for (I use NetBSD, and I have
> various O'Reilly books on various things, that I'm still wading
> through).

> It's really things between the Linux OS and the Cobalt configuration
> that I find are missing. Like not knowing that reinstalling the OS would
> wipe out the hard drive, until we had to do it,

In the booklet that comes with my Restore CDs, it says "WARNING: The
Cobalt OS Restore CD completely ereases the disk drive of the Cobalt
product before restoring it to a factory-fresh state."  That's pretty
definitive as I see it <smile>.

> or that for .htaccess to
> work you have to set 'AuthPAM_Enabled off', which I found somewhere in a
> back cobalt-users message example, but haven't even now found in any
> Apache or Cobalt documentation, and wasn't in an Apache Week tutorial -
> or others - that I had found.

No, though it's obscure, it's actually it's a bit of common sense and a
thorough reading up on how PAM works.  .htaccess will use PAM if PAM is
installed.  In fact almost everything will use PAM if it's installed;
you can control that behavior with source code and/or makefiles, but
most of us just install software to it's default setting.

I don't expect Cobalt to document anything about their linux, because
they sell their boxes as appliances.  When they do document something
I'm pleasantly surprised.

> Hence this list is so useful, but I can't help thinking that a technical
> manual would save a lot of questions!

I think it would and I know it would be a great project.  Unfortunately
I don't have the time right now (unless someone wants to give me a nice
advance <smile>.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
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