On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 08:48:08PM -0500, Mocha wrote:
> the install doc for each platform does it pretty well to get you up and 
> running. but it's not a tutorial or such. once you get it  up and running, 
> it's pretty standard.

Well, the install docs (and the install process) are great for getting you up
and running.  The man pages are excellent and really allow me to use the
system.  But imagine if you'd just come form debian linux or something... and
that you'd had a good book on it and it's configuration files in /etc as well
as other features.  Lets say that anytime you forgot how to do something you
could browse the book and it'd refesh you enough to read the right man pages.
Well, I just thought I'd say that such books and documentation are available
for man other Unix Systems, but that I havn't encountered anything
specifically for netBSD.

What would be nice to see is a book, or multi-volume reference, which not only
describes some of the commands (unix in a nutshell) but also what you can do
with the system, like route between multiple network interfaces, set up ppp,
allow people to dial in, etc.  It would also be nice if it described what most
of the /etc files are for, how they're used by the system when booting, etc.
And then added things like how to set up and choose between qmail and sendmail
and others, as well as introducing a user to the ability to do some things
they may not have considered.

Of course, I'm not demanding that this is a necessity, or that anyone should
go ahead and start writing this, but I'd just thought it would be really
usefull to have.  I'm not really a NetBSD user yet, so I couldn't even begin
to write anything like this.

>>What I'd like to know is whether the setup of netbsd conforms to some standard
>>that I can read about elsewhere... like a generic BSD4.4 admin book or perhaps
>>something by O'Reily.
> 

-Daniel