If you’re signed up to the Slackware Security Mailing list (and if you’re running Slackware, you really should be, like a good little Slack Bunny) then you’ll notice that rather a lot of security updates dropped into your mail box this morning. Ten of them, in fact. I waited for Michiel to sync the mirrors, then i updated (see lesson eight). At this point Michiel decided to totally distract me from the mound of sewing repairs i was supposed to be doing.. and give me lesson nine instead… on daemons, inits (no, not innits – despite the title, we’re not a bunch of Chavs), and pretty colours in Konsole.
Occasionally Pat will change the config files – the files that are involved somehow when Slackware starts up. these are kept in the /etc/rc.d/ directory, they’re called init files (from Initialisation, not the chav thing) and you can tell they’re init files cos they all start with rc. Its important as a good Slackadmin to keep track of these changes – when they’re made, the extension is always .new so that they don’t automagically install, and gives the admin the chance to check the changes and see if they’re changes they’re happy with (for all that Pat is called The Benelovent Dictator for life, he doesn’t do a whole lot of Dictatorship stuff. I guess that’s the benelovent part. 
). If the Slackadmin is happy, then the changes can be made, but with backups of the old config files kept so that if there are any problems, the changes can be undone without too much of a problem.
You can tell that there are changes to the configuration files because when slackpkg is run (see lesson eight) it asks the slackadmin if they want to keep, overwrite, remove, or prompt. In my case Michiel’s already had a good look at the changes way before i get to updating, so this isn’t something i have to worry about just yet (thankfully).
One of the changes that was made this time around was to the ssh daemon. ssh is short for secure shell – its basically a secure, encrypted connection between one computer and another. the daemon is the process that controls this – you can think of it as being like a little red demon, pitchfork n all, that holds the door open, but only allows approved traffic through. Kind of like a bouncer, if you like. if you stop the daemon, by going to the /etc/rc.d/ directory and typing ./rc.sshd stop then it kind of freezes the demon, and he can’t hold the door open any more, and all traffic controled by that process stops. to “open the door” again, you go to the same directory (if you’re not already there) and type ./rc.sshd start – However, if you are working remotely on a box, and you stop the daemon, then you effectively lose your connection, so its not a good idea to do this unless you have someone physically on the other end to type the start command.
Something i noticed while in konsole, looking at all the init files, was the different colours, and at this point i asked Michiel about them. Seems they’re standard colours, they act as a visual representation of the different file types. dark blue is directories. green have the executable bits set (in other words, they do stuff). cyan ones are symbolic links to other files. Grey files are normal colours. Purple files (someone call for Londo! [sorry. bad Babylon 5 joke]) are images, and red files are compressed archives. Yellow ones are device files. The different colours can be checked in Konsole by typing view /etc/DIR_COLORS.
and there endeth lesson nine!
