[Courses] Course idea/request (a third one)

[Marleen Garcia]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 10:08:51AM +0100, Finne Boonen <fboonen at vub.ac.be> wrote:

> how to use regulare expressions, I can draw the finite state automa up on
> paper, but never manage to translate them to regulare expressions that are
> being used on cli apps


Fabulous ideas for courses, I think - mysql & regex ...

Maybe a third suggestion (I'm not experienced enough to do this):

mail  (= mailhandling & filtering

            procmail,
            creating a complicated, decent (working), procmailrc,
            -! procmailsc (scoring of mail),
                  ('man procmailsc' - 2 examples of scoring given,
                  but I think I felt my brain bounce around in my
                  head, saying, 'No, not this, get me out of here
                  now! The pain. The torture. Cannot make sense of
                  this! Well, maybe it's just me :-)

            spamassassin (+ sa-learn)

            fetchmail & sendmail and/or postfix or any other MTA
            that exists and can be discussed

            mutt, kmail & other mailers that exist for Linux -
            esp. what features are special to that mailer that
            other mailers do not have, if that's the case

      )

+ For every part:

            .     mention (perhaps per distribution), the location
                  of the package information, whether or not it
                  comes with examples or not (for procmail there
                  are a few examples, but they don't tell you how
                  to get *everything* out of procmail - do we
                  really have to buy a book for that -> oh oh).

            .     + the location of the config file & what you can
                  or can't adapt.

            .     all the man pages to read


Sort of brings all existing info into one document, when it states
the names of all the man pages to read as well as the config files'
location, and even the location of the binary (does it vary per
distribution).

For ex. in kmail, if you set your mail transport not to your
provider's smtp, but to local sendmail you need to know the
location of the binary - or how to look for it. In SuSE, it's in
('find / -name sendmail' -> /usr/sbin/) - perhaps it would even be
*cool* to let people search for all files related to procmail,
sendmail (esp. at the point of discussing kmail and setting up the
mail transport.) I can imagine newbies who want to fast setup mail,
going through a couple of directories in frustration. A lot of
files are named sendmail, ok which one then is the binary? There
needs to be some info on binaries being in (s)bin dirs.

            /etc/init.d/sendmail
            /etc/permissions.d/sendmail
            /etc/sysconfig/sendmail
            /var/run/sendmail
            /usr/share/doc/packages/sendmail
            /usr/share/sendmail
            /usr/lib/sendmail
            /usr/sbin/sendmail

Mutt delivers mail to sendmail with options (-o -i, I think though
I am not sure).

It would be nice if courses all start off keeping the clueless and
lazy newbie in mind, though not treating them as idiots. They know
nothing about how to set up mail, or how to set the binary to  ...
or how to find files even.

Marleen