On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Mike Lurk wrote:
... If you look closely you will see that of the contributors are all volunteers and they provide all of this in their spare time in locations which are easy for any Fedora Core user to find. I have made links to all these sites and that made it easy to find answers to most of my questions, and if I don't find them there I come here to see if there is any resolution or fix.
no argument there, but you inadvertantly supported my point when you referred to "all these sites". while i'm eternally grateful to the volunteers who take the time to put together these sites/docs/faqs, the fundamental problem seems to be that there are too many places to look for the answer to what is generally a simple question.
in some cases, the volunteers are so determined to publicize as much info as possible that what *does* get published can be frustratingly incomplete -- sometimes in as little as a single but critical detail.
as i posted earlier, i'm trying to create and mount an encrypted filesystem using dm-crypt under FC2. i spent some time this morning hunting around, making notes of sites that talk about this, but nowhere did i find a single, comprehensive HOWTO that shows me how to do it, from scratch.
inevitably, some day, there will most likely be numerous encrypted filesystem HOWTOs out there, all of them missing some crucial detail,
so rather than one solid tutorial, we'll have lots of almost-solid tutorials. and, as i said, i think the problem is that lots of people are more interested in generating volume than in writing a small number of really good, tightly-focused guides.
in terms of my example with dm-crypt, it would be nice to find a single doc with contents like:
- what are encrypted filesystems? - what are the prerequisites for my FC2 system? - what RPMs do i need? - what kernel configuration must i have? - what modules will i need to load? - if i'm using LVM, - how can i see the current state of the VGs and LVs? - how do i create a new LV that will be my enc. FS? - how can i verify the result of that operation? - how do i use "cryptsetup" to finish things off?
i contend that, if there was one rigorous, complete guide to using dm-crypt for FC2, no one else would bother trying to write one. and that strikes me as a good thing, but that's just my personal opinion. it seems that there's just too many people re-inventing the same wheel, and very few of them getting it just right.
rday
p.s. as an off-the-top-of-my-head example, have you noticed how many people wrote guides for how to configure and build a 2.4 kernel? does the world really need 5,000 kernel-building HOWTOs? one really good one would probably have been enough. :-)
