As my home network expands, the time I spend doing administration tasks on it increases. As machines are added, I am required to add users to each machine, and mount directories so they are backed up on the server. By implementing autofs the problem of users' directories is solved. For users, I decided to implement NIS to centralize user administration.

If you are interested in Linux and live in the Arab world you may be interested in the following web sites:

• An Evaluation of the use of Linux in business, government and education is a white paper by Kefah Eisa, in Arabic, and in PDF format.
• Various articles on Computer Arabization - A collections of articles on computers and Arabization, including a list of issues in dealing with Arabic on the Internet, and various methods of achieving it.

When upgrading Mandrake, e.g. from 9.1 to 10.0, make sure you delete the old hdlist.cz and synthesis.* files from the previous release, and use urpmi.addmedia to add the new release media (CD) to your machine.Here is a list of commands to do that:cd /var/lib/urpmi/# Cleanup the old media for URPMI.# Note: You could delete everything, or just choose to delete the ones that are on the old 9.1 CDs.

My history with UNIX

This article describes how I came to know about UNIX, and later, Linux.

Part of this is personal, documenting to myself when I started using each of the aforementioned systems.

Part of it is quasi academic research using digital archeology techniques to dig up old mails, search old files and directories, and try to piece together the sequence of events on how the above happened.

This email is one attempt to reach someone for getting Linux by an alternate way, other than FTP.We did not have TCP/IP at the time, and our connection was X.25, and we paid by the byte.