I think I just answered my own question: hardlinked files to a single specific inode ARE the same file......reference is to the inode (the actual file). As long as any single filename associated with a specific inode exist then that file exists and is useable.
symlinked files refer one filename to another filename......reference is a filename. In this case, there is an actual original file....deleting the file pointed to makes the symlinked file useless. In both situations, I can edit any of the hardlinked files or symlinked files and still be editing all the relative files at the same time....I am, in effect, only editing a single file. So, provided I have this correct, it was very eductional but did not necessarily answer my original query. Is there a single best place to edit network related files on any distribution of linux, that will allow me to be assured that the files I am looking for will be there? I guess I mean a standard directory (under /etc ?) that I can go to regardless of distribution, to edit these files......and if anyone has a quick list of those filename then that would be helpful......... I'm expecting to hear that on LSB compliant distros then you can go here, on gentoo, bsd and maybe slack you can go here and on RH and MDK you go here. The whole reason I'm going here is because I do a bit of non-official support on RH7.2, RH7.3 on a couple of servers in our data center......direct and total support of some kind of *BSD as part of our F5 BigIP load balancing devices, and now I am directly in the middle of setting up a RH 8 utility server to run OpenNMS, Rancid, and some TACACS+ package that I have yet to choose. About to get really knee deep and can't wait. BTW, yesterday I finally got my Cisco 3005 VPN configured so that I could use the Cisco vpn client for linux (4.0.3.B) to create an ipsec tunnel through into our network..........can I tell ya? Its SWEET!!!!!!! I'm pretty pumped about it too, if you could already tell!!! Cleve
