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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

My worry here is that, in posting what seems to be a book, people just won't even do it because we don't have time to do it, unless this is a primary part of their jobs.

If a 10 minute guide gets users 90% of the way, then they're more likely to do it. And that's good enough to cover a majority of automated attacks.

Update: I take it back – they've provided scripts to run this stuff. I will explore these. Thanks for the link.

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Back in the day, The Linux Documentation Project had a trove of hundreds of HOWTOs covering every facet of using Linux. By today's standards they seem like "books", but in reality they were step-by-step instructions for anything you could ever want to do in Linux. No digging through forums, no combing through man pages, no following broken outdated blog posts that didn't explain what you were doing. I find it sad that these are seen as detrimental today.

I feel like arch wiki is that thing today. It's a bit disorganised and things get outdated while nobody's looking, but there's almost anything you'd every want in there.

It seems like there a bunch of articles there but they're more like notes on how to use a tool specifically with Arch, rather than a guide for everyone.

Compare this page http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Quota.html to this page https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_quota . TLDP organized HOWTOs like mini-books; tables of content, multiple authors, versioned releases, and of course, you could download them all and search through them by category. And they didn't assume things like the distribution setting up a bunch of the tools and system for you, so you learned how the tools actually worked.

Sure, it's a different format. But you can always dig into man pages or other documentation to learn the details. Arch wiki is great for practical solutions - for example https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI is the place to go to for hidpi display configuration. TLDP has not been seriously updated since hidpi even came out. Similar to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management - there's no recent TLDP equivalent.

I appreciate TLDP for what it is and the details they go to. But Arch wiki can easily be read as a FAQ for all modern systems. And it will usually send you to other places for details (sometimes TLDP as well)

So are they outdated now?

A lot of the commands they documented have become obsolete or out of fashion.

E.g. Apache 1, BIND, sendmail, cgi-bin, ifconfig, etc.

Check out the arch linux wiki.

The problem isn't that it's long; the problem is that it's not navigable - there needs to be a table of contents. There's great stuff in here, but it's hard to sort out what I already know how to do from what I can actually use.

HTML version now has a TOC as well!

There is a table of contents in the PDF version.

Yeah, but it's a PDF. Anyway, why can't you generate a TOC into the HTML version from whatever format you're actually authoring in? Good tooling support should make this not hard.

EDIT: And now the HTML version has a TOC, too! Talk about immediate gratification -- kudos to whoever did that!

I wrote a tool the other day to help create a Table of Contents https://github.com/kaihendry/toc

Agreed - it is a bit long. But if you want to set something up from top to bottom it may be worth it. Cool - I saw the link to Github as well, looks like there is code to do much of what the article outlines. Awesome.

The hackthis application that is referenced in the guide is also in Github here:

https://github.com/inversoft/passport-js-example

It uses Ember, Node.js, Express, Sequelize, MySQL and Passport User Database (https://www.inversoft.com/products/user-database-sso).

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