Each of us is a little bit like a gravity well…

January 12, 2010

the only thing that varies is how wide the cone is.

If you’re reading this, you are exposed to information. You read blogs, or at least a blog. If you don’t read any others, you should. There’s a lot of good stuff out there.

Maybe blogs aren’t your thing, though. If that’s the case, I appreciate you reading mine, however you got here. But if you aren’t into blogs, or even if you are, you should look in other places for information as well.

I’d never been into mailing lists, myself. I only recently started, because of LOPSA. I’m on a few of the many LOPSA mail lists, though not all. There are far too many for that. I’m still getting into it. After I got used to having strangers invade my inbox every day, I sort of liked the idea. I was afraid that I’d be force fed information, but that’s not the case at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love info. I soak it up, actually, but the idea of having to read dozens of emails every day? Unappealing.

As it turns out, I learned to treat it more like a buffet. I deleted the threads I had no interest in, read the ones that were interesting, and replied on the occasion that I could contribute to the conversation. All in all, it’s really sort of like a slow version of serverfault, except I didn’t have to go there. So I warmed up to the idea of newsgroups.

I asked on twitter the other day what mailing lists people read. I’m not sure I was prepared for the tumultuous response. Apparently, people read mailing lists. But that’s probably no surprise to you ;-)

A lot of people shared their lists, with the admonition that they’d better see a blog post out of the results! Well, alright, if you insist.

I asked for mailing lists, and most of the following are. Some of them have forums to go along with the mailing lists, and one or two are just forums, but people wanted to share them with me, so I’m sharing them with you!

LOPSA	http://lopsa.org/mailman/listinfo
LOPSA-NJ	http://lopsanj.org/mailman/listinfo
ADSM (Storage)	http://tsmwiki.com/tsmwiki/ADSM-L
DC-SAGE	http://www.dc-sage.org
SANS Security	http://lists.sans.org
FreeBSD Security	http://security.freebsd.org
Security Focus	http://www.securityfocus.com/archive
Firewall Wizards	https://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Unix Guru Universe	http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=admin.mailing-list
LUG/IP (Princeton, NJ)	http://lugip.org
New York LUG	http://www.nylug.org/mlist/index.shtml
Long Island LUG	http://lilug.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists
Windows User Groups	http://www.usergroup.org/windows.html
Nagios	http://wiki.nagios.org/index.php/Mail_Lists
Icinga	http://www.icinga.org
QMail/DJB	http://cr.yp.to/lists.html
Squid	http://www.squid-cache.org/Support/mailing-lists.dyn
Reconnoiter	http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/reconnoiter-users
Varnish	http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/wiki/MailingLists

The twitterers who responded were (in random order):
@sam_pointer, @trombonekenny, @geekofallwork, @fferret, @f3ew, @lintzston, @mramos29, and @augmentedfourth. If you’re looking for some good sysadmin twitterers, you could do a lot worse than to start there!

A special bonus should go to @rejectreality, who sent me this link: http://gmane.org. It’s a mailing list archive that has just over 12,000 mailing lists on it. So if you’re looking for some mailing list archive love, head over there and get your fill!

Thanks to everyone who responded. There is a reason that I was curious which lists you all subscribed to, and it’ll be common knowledge soon. In the meantime, if you have a favorite mailing list that isn’t in the table above, comment and let us know. I’d love to hear about it, and I’m sure other readers would be interested too! Thanks!

Posted in General