Martian

So I have a project that I'm sort of turning over in my head, and I'd like to get a feel for how much interest there would be for such a thing.

Let's say you send an email. You type it up, you maybe proofread it and you hit the send button. The message disappears from your outbox and reappears in the recipient's inbox. What happens in between? For most folks, it's dark voodoo magic. There be monsters.

I recently pulled the trigger on setting up my own server. There were a few reasons I wanted to do this, but one of the fringe benefits was that I was able to give access to someone else who's looking to learn about all of this stuff. He'll be able to poke around, look through logs and config files and see how it all works. It's a great learning opportunity; trouble is, without some sort of guidance a lot of this stuff is basically meaningless.

Similarly, in my day job I often encounter ignorance. It's not wilful or malicious -- it's just that most people don't know how all of this internet stuff really works, and there aren't very many useful resources for learning. I didn't really understand the nuts and bolts of it until I got a chance to work with it directly, and I suspect a lot of people in the field have had a similar experience (our sys admin recently confided in me that he knew nothing about our core product prior to being hired on with our company, for example). Even Wikipedia, that font of general basic knowledge, tends to approach technical subjects with those who already understand the systems in mind. The entry on DNS, for example, has stuff like this in the section titled "Operation":

Granted I understand what they're talking about, but I suspect that's mostly because I knew all about it before I read the article. An article that only makes sense to people who already understand the subject matter isn't terribly useful.

Since I now have my own server in internetland and as a perk of my job I can register domains pretty much willy-nilly, setting up a site dedicated to a particular subject isn't particularly hard for me to do. One of the things I'm thinking about lately is what to do with my newfound server, though, and to that end (and in light of the above) I've been considering writing a series of articles on the various technologies that make the internet work. I'm envisioning it somewhere in between a How Stuff Works article and the mumbo-jumbo jive-talk above -- fairly technical, but grounded and simple enough to be understandable to the layperson.

What these articles will not be is a series of how-to guides. If you need to know all the technical details of how to set up a server for service X, you can find dozens of walkthroughs and configuration guides out there. I don't feel the need to be yet another voice in that particular crowd. They will also be fairly limited in scope -- I plan on talking about internet stuff, and where examples will be given they'll reference Linux software, since that's what I'm comfortable with. I'm also not opposed to the idea of having other contributors for the subjects I'm less familiar with (Windows stuff, desktop hardware, smartphones being a few examples).

My credentials, if anyone is wondering, are that my 9-5 involves working on this stuff on a day-to-day basis. The company I work for earns it's bread on managed DNS hosting services, but on any given day I might be trouble shooting zone data, poring over mail logs in search of wayward messages or diagnosing configuration issues on an Apache web server.

A few topics off the top of my head that I would be covering are as follows:

- email -- how it gets around
- email -- spam and the things we do to prevent it
- TCP/IP -- how computers talk to each other
- web servers -- How a web page gets from the internet to your screen
- SSL -- how we make sure you're giving your credit card info to Amazon and not some sweaty dude in Russia
And, of course
- DNS -- the internet's phone book

So what say you, TFP? Would you be interested in reading something like this, or is it stupid and pointless? I'm particularly looking for the opinions of folks who don't have a technical background; do you want to know how the magic actually happens, or are you happy just so long as it works?

Comments, go!

__________________
I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame