Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/05/27/0006.html

[Convention: I refer to a certain OS/company as "Evil Empire" primarily
because someone has suggested in the past that naming them directly
increases the number of "hits" that the mailing list gets when people
go search for help with Evil Empire problems.  Every few months, someone
wanders in asking us to send them a driver for their CD ROM in their
Evil Empire computer.]

Some general comments:

 * You probably will learn more about running and using UNIX if you
   hunker down and live with the command line.  That doesn't mean
   that it's worthwhile for everyone to do, of course.  (^&

 * vi is actually a fairly nice editor.  It does, like the rest of
   the system, take some getting used to.  NetBSD ships with four
   editors that I'm aware of:

     ed  *really* primitive.  Useful in emergencies if your system
         fails to boot multiuser.  (Though due to a change made since
         the 1.3 days, ed is no longer runnable if you fail a multiuser
         boot; you have to manually "mount -a"; I'm told that it is
         then once more usable in singleuser mode.)

     ex  A kind of souped-up, slightly incompatible, version of ed,
         which I have never used.  (^&

    sed  Stream EDitor, kind of like ed, but more intended to be used
         by scripts to automatically do edits than for interactive use.

     vi  A "visual" screen-editor that you have started to use.
   
   I've had occasion to use every one of these except ex.  I think
   that ed would be better if it would work (as it used to) even when
   only / is mounted in a default config under singleuser.  My first
   use of NetBSD ed was when I first installed NetBSD and forgot to tell
   /etc/rc.conf that I wanted a multiuser boot.  ed let me view/edit
   /etc/rc.conf comfortably.

   I'm writing this email in vi on my (headless) web-/mail-server.
   For some tasks I use GNU EMACS.

 * You probably don't *need* any of the packages for your firewall.
   However, if you really hate vi, you might consider looking at
   pkgsrc (or pre-built packages in the "binary packages" arm of
   the NetBSD package system).  Some editors can use X, some
   require X, some use text.

 * You *can* use graphical applications remotely.  This is one of
   the nice thigns about the X Window System.  X is network-trans-
   parent.  If your firewall is headless, you won't get much benefit
   from setting up X on the firewall, but if you have the libraries
   installed you can run X applications.  If you have an X server
   running on your Evil Empire computers, you can have the firewall
   open windows remotely.  (The easiest, reasonably secure way to
   do this is to ssh into the firewall and have ssh provide for
   forwarding an X session.  On the firewall side, this is as simple
   as modifying the config file for sshd.  On the Evil Empire side,
   you are a bit more on your own.  Though the Cygwin project may
   be helpful.  I don't know if Putty is of any help for this.)

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/