Re: Ipfwadm

[Robert Graham <robert_david_graham () yahoo com>]

--- Paul Marcus <pmarcus () erols com> wrote:
> Yes. man ipfwadm
> Bluefish [@ home] wrote:
> > Can ipfwadm be setup with a rule which denies all ports between 1 and 1023
> > ? All I find are rules which restrict singel ports...

<humor>
Three men are in a hot-air balloon.  Soon, they find themselves lost
in a canyon somewhere.  One of the three men says, "I've got an idea.
We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices
far."

So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooo! Where are
we?" (They hear the echo several times).

15 minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo!
You're lost!!"

One of the men says, "That must have been a UNIX guru." Puzzled,
one of the other men asks, "Why do you say that?"

The reply: "For three reasons.
     (1) he took a long time to answer,
     (2) he was absolutely correct, and
     (3) his answer was absolutely useless."

</humor>

<rant>
"man foo" is not the answer to every question. Manual page are almost universally obtuse and
difficult to read. They do well when you have forgotten a detail, but they almost never answer
"How do I ...?" questions.

For example, 15 years ago (when I was learning UNIX) I asked somebody "how do I find a file on the
system". The response was "man find". Several frustrating hours later I could still not find the
solution and simply wrote my own program do it in 15 minutes. The crux of the matter was that you
need to add "-print" to the command in order to print the output of the find. Yes, it says that
right in the man page, but it is non-obvious. Something as simple as having a few typical usage
examples at the bottom would be of immense value, but almost no man pages have that.

Since the answer to every question is in some manual somewhere, it seems kinda pointless even to
waste the bandwith to say so.
</rant>




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