Feel free to ask your site-wide questions here. If you have any comments or questions specific to individual section in the book, please consider using the "discussion" link via that specific section page.
At this time, you may also use the bsdcert mailing list for discussion too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Any other examples of a community quickly creating a book?
Have a look here:
"a crowd of people dreamed, wrote, designed, edited, marketed and published in 50 days. ... book written with the use of crowdsourcing ... just 10 days, almost 1,000 people ..."
What is the mission statement or objective for this book?
See the introduction chapter.
How do you sign up?
On the wiki, click "Edit" (on top left).
Then choose your own username and choose a password and click "Register".
You will need to enter the "account creation password" -- ask an existing member or the BSD Certification Group list for this.
Then enter your email address and password again and click "Create Account".
That should get you registered with the wiki.
Then go to a specific topic page (or more) you are interested in and click "Edit" and at the top enter your name, email address (or other contact info), and what BSDs you use.
Who can edit the content?
Anyone can improve the book. If you have a sentence to add, a typo to fix, or paragraph to reword, please do it even if you are not the author for that topic.
Be sure to clearly (but briefly) describe your change in the commit log message.
Why work on this book instead of a pre-existing book or another documentation project?
This book and documentation project has clearly defined goals, objective, and timeline. The topics covered in this book are based on careful analysis of a widely-publicized survey by the BSD Certification Group. This book will not ramble on to different undefined topics, go into too much depth for some topics while ignoring other important topics.
Who is handling the ISBN, printing and distributing the book?
Reed Media Services already has an ISBN purchased for use of this book. They will be coordinating the printing and distribution.
Is this project/book approved by the BSD Certification Group?
Yes, the project is approved by the BSD Certification Group. It was initially proposed in detail on the internal BSD Certification Group mailing list. It was agreed that the copyright of the wiki pages (resulting in the book) will be owned by the BSD Certification Group, Inc. The final book has not been approved as it has not been completed yet.
Who can use/re-use this book?
The book's contents are under a BSD license. Anyone may re-use this content. Feel free to use it as is for you own learning or for teaching classes. Feel free to expand it and provide to your students. Feel free to expand it to make your own BSD admin encyclopedia :) Feel free to use parts of it for your own articles or to supplement other documentation. Just be sure to follow the simple requirements in the license.
Why not have the document's topics further divided by each BSD flavour?
The goal of the book is to cover the basics and generic and beginning skills (for the admins with "light to moderate skills"). In most cases, the same concept and skill is applicable by all BSDs.
Please see the bsd flavour wikipage for more details.
I don't see recent changes. What's up? I've added content in some sections recently, and it's not appearing on the site, though it does seem to be committed in RCS. Is everything OK?
Maybe your browser has the webpage cached. Try clicking reload in your web browser on the .html webpage.
How do I format this ....?
See the Style Guide. If not answered there, please ask about it.
I like this wiki engine. What is it?
This is ikiwiki from http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net/. reed wrote the rcshistory.cgi script, "rcs" plugin for ikiwiki, and coded some minor patches. The mark-up language is Markdown plus some extensions also coded by reed.
How can I upload an image or attach a file?
Contact reed to get permission for this.