by In the last #LOPSA-live chat session, cat suggested that we need a “hints” RSS. She was suggesting that daily we should post a simple one or two liner that answers a really quick question. To use her words, “pithy one-or-so liners that are useful, but not so useful as to be worth a full posting”. Some of her examples included: “here’s how to do a screen shot of one window in X”, “here’s how to get to the LOM on a Sun box”, etc.
Although I wasn’t at the #LOPSA-live event, and didn’t know about cat’s idea, I had also recently come up with the idea I was calling the “Sysadmin Short Cuts”. My idea was that they would be slightly longer (a couple of paragraphs to one printed page or so), and would be good starting points for people to generate content. One of the main complaints we hear from people about generating content for the website is that its too difficult to write a full length article. But everyone says they can answer questions, such as are brought up on the mailing list. I thought I’d start to collect some ideas that would be mailing list type questions and people could choose from them to write an answer, but on the website.
So, for all you who claim you want to write for LOPSA, but think a full length article is too difficult… try a Short Cut or a Hint. Think of a small topic that can be answered in anything from a couple of lines to a couple of paragraphs, wrfite it up and send it to “me”:spp@lopsa.org (for now). We’re developing a special place on the LOPSA website for “Hints” (as well as distribute through RSS). And to get you started, here’s some ideas:
* How do you determine whether a specific patch is installed on a Solaris server?
* How can I tell whether I am running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of [Windows/Linux/Solaris/etc]?
* What steps do I need to follow to set up a DNS client on a [Solaris/Linux/AIX] system?
Need more ideas? Keep watching my blog for topics and/or times when I’ll be on #lopsa to discuss this.