Unit 6 from D.C.

This posting is short and sweet as I'm out of town and haven't been able to complete the router assignments due to being away from my home router. However, I've been doing my homework in between sessions here at ALA.

The html & css tutorials were very helpful, and although I’ve worked minimally with actually writing html, I’m used to looking at the screens and the language via Dreamweaver and our library's CMS which is powered by Joomla. CSS however had always been a mystery to me, so I’m really excited to have learned how to set a background color or font for every webpage that I may create.

I’m looking forward to learning more about scripts, as scripts seem to be key to interoperability between systems, although as of yet I’m not sure to what extent this is true; I know that scripts control the different softwares being used.

Unit 5 & the Network Train

There seems to be so much reading required for this class, and everything that we read is crucial to understanding the concepts – sometimes the detail is so technical I find that I have to reread a section 2 or more times before it sinks in. It feels that in part by osmosis and repetition that I’m coming to understand how everything works together. This week’s unit on networking has been one of most interesting thus far, although honestly binary numbers are still throwing me for a local loop (joke). A long train ride up to Oakland allowed me to plow through the Nemeth reading, although again, it’s when I get to the binary numbers and IP addresses that I feel a bit lost.

I guess as far as learning types I fall into the visual learner category, although I think there must be a tinge of verbal learning style in the mix. The videos in this week’s readings were great, especially the interview with Metcalfe discussing the creation of Ethernet and the video on sending data packets across the LAN and internet – this latter selection kind of reminded me of space mountain.

Adding groups & users: grover, ernie & bert

I thought the installation of webmin to be pretty straightforward. At first when I found the ip address using ifconfig, I didn’t realize that the 10000 had to be added onto the end, but once I typed in correctly all went well.

We were supposed to create 3 users and 3 groups (user name in each instance corresponded to a group of the same name). I chose names that were easy to remember, preferring to go with a sesame street theme so that now I have 3 new users & groups: grover, ernie & bert.

I was a little alarmed when I first saw the message “grover is not in sudoers file. This incident will be reported” but as I looked more closely at the instructions I realized this is the message that I should see since I had not added the admin group in the useradd command line. Although I'm still wondering to who/what grover's incident will be reported?

Adding a user & group through the remote desktop did not seem to go as well as the Webmin or VM processes, as testing files with the sudo nano testfile command in the terminal utility took me to the GNU nano testfile, and from here none of my commands seemed to work. Eventually I just had to restart in order to escape. Overall I found the remote desktop a little cagey and slow, although the GUI utility for adding groups & users was easy to navigate. Ultimately I think that I'm slowly coming around to appreciating the CLI for all its transparency, and the more I type in the black screen (on the VM), the easier it seems to read through the lines of text...

More command line fun

I found the vi tutorial to take much longer than described in the assignments document. I’m not complaining though – thus far I feel this tutorial has been the most helpful in the hands-on exercises, and think this is in part because of the background I’ve been gaining in the readings, writing down and executing commands as well as looking up definitions.

I like going back and forth between insert and command using esc and i. It’s neat to see that the keyboard can have so many uses. I also like the :help command. This is so much better than accessing help in a different window, which has been my usual experience in using GUIs. Here help appears at the top of your window.

The most extensive configuration that I had done before this class was setting up wireless configuration on library users’ laptops and some commands through telnet for our library’s ILS Millennium. I’m used to the computer or the software “telling” me what is necessary (auto updates, automatic configurations, etc). But with the CLI there is an interesting paradox in that while we’re configuring everything by hand, there is at the same time the ability to make more extensive changes with one command than would be possible with the GUI. Not that I’m ready for that yet, but with repetition & memorization I’m hopeful that all the exercises and readings will come together to form a cohesive whole.