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Linux Site O' The Month: Unix Guru Universe

By Sean Lamb

What's This?

This article is the the current installment in an ongoing series of site reviews for the Linux community. Each month, I will highlight a Linux-related site and tell you all about it. The intent of these articles is to let you know about sites that you might not have been to before, but they will all have to do with some aspect of Linux. Now, on with the story...

Unix Guru Universe - "The Official Home Page for Unix System Administrators"

http://www.ugu.com

I can hear you yelling now - "Hey waittaminnitt! This is Linux Gazette, not UN*X Gazette!" Just hold your horses, and listen for a moment. Linux was originally written as a UNIX clone, right? All right, that may be an oversimplification, but the ls command will work the same in UNIX as in AIX or *BSD or Linux, right? Well, let's take a look at what we can find.

Unix Guru Universe (UGU) is a clearing house of information for a great majority of UNIX-like operating systems in use today. This includes Solaris, HP-UX, OpenBSD and, of course, our beloved Linux. If we follow the link from the UGU home page to the list of 80 UNIX flavors (yes, there really are that many), then the link to Linux, we are provided with a wealth of information about configuring, adminning and just using Linux.

Included in the Linux Articles section are the Network Administrator's Guide, the Firewall and Proxy Server HOWTO and the Linux DNS Howto. The Linux-specific section of UGU also has a list of useful FTP and User Group sites as well as links to many of the larger distributions (not just Redhat, Caldera and SuSE, but others too like Walnut Creek and Yggdrasil). There is also a Linux-specific web bulletin board under the Newsgroup link.

However, don't forsake the rest of UGU just to get to the Linux-specific information. If we look under the Beginners & Users Start Here link, we find helpful general information including a brief history of UNIX, an Introduction To The UNIX Operating System, Commonly Used Commands, and UNIX Commands For DOS Users.

Even with these beginner documents, UGU is aimed at the sysadmin who is looking for a handy reference on a wide variety of UNIX platforms. UGU's about page says it best:

... UGU was developed for the System Administrators who don't have time to surf/cruise/browse the internet looking across the world for the information they seek. It was developed so an Admin could go in find what they are looking for quickly and easily and get out. The page is for ALL Admins beginners to guru's alike to share.

On the Internet of today, it's hard to find sites that have more and better content than flash. UGU faces up to this challenge excellently; this site, aside from the home page, is almost entirely graphics free. This means, of course, that the site is exceedingly fast loading on even the pokiest of today's dial up connections (it's even tolerable at 2400 baud). UGU also avoids the use of tables and doesn't use frames so you can browse the site using almost any browser currently available.

Regular readers of this column will know that I like search engines. For a newbie to any site, it is much easier to get a feel for what's available by letting the search engine highlight the content that the user is looking for. UGU's search engine is under the Find It Fast, Find It Now link on the home page and the Search link at the bottom of each content page. UGU's search provided quick and relevant results to my searches, returning information on the UGU site as well as links to software developers' sites for further information.

So, once you get your box up and running and you need information on how to admin it efficiently and securely, check out the information at UGU.