Recently, my primary machine suffered a severe distributed denial of service attack, and I was forced to move it behind a more competent firewall (from OSX to OpenBSD. I knew roughly what I needed to do: set up additional interfaces and aliases, get NAT and ipf working, and so on. And in fact I've been employed in the past as a Unix admin.

But for the last year, instead of doing some perl and some unix, I've been doing hard core perl. Haaaaaaaard core perl. I'm averaging roughly 150-200 lines of code a day. When I sat down to go and make my firewall, I realized I no longer had the tools necessary. I'd read all the books, all of the manpages, and knew all the theories, but I had completely forgotten how such things work.

So my question is, since I work in a 100% POSIX environment (well, okay, so my "outlook" machine runs windows, but I really despise it and dont use it), it shouldn't be so hard to incorporate some Unixy stuff; What can I do to "get back to my roots" and re-learn all this stuff?

Lately, my focus has been databases and file munging (hey, isnt that what we all do these days?). But I want to defocus some, and get back into unix.

What resources are there out there that are both needing capable Unix people (I dont count myself among the incompetent yet) and stimulating enough to keep my attention when work is pressing... and still perlish?

Things I've been thinking about are psh (the perl shell), the mythical perl kernel (I saw this mentioned in TPJ quite a while ago, does it still exist, has anyone worked on it?), and stuff like giFT, which is a unix program (written in C) that needs some perl help. All of these projects have the added benefit of being perly, being interesting, and being unixy.

I've thought that perhaps I could send in some patches for various things in perl5 that were irritating me, but I've got two main objections. First, I've been reading toke.c lately, and, well, it kind of turns my stomach. Second, I want to get back into knowing and using stuff like NFS, NIS, DNS, cvs, and sendmail. (All these are things I've used and known in the past but escape me now for various reasons)

We're a broadly multitalented group, so I am positive others here have run into a similar problem. What have you done when you realized that your Unix (or insert other skill here) skills were suffering at the expense of your Perl getting better?

Thanks,
brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

In reply to (OT) defocusing a bit to re-learn and re-evaluate other aspects of one's skillset (discussion) by deprecated

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