mnathani: congrats :) staticsafe: what is top posting posting your reply about the original message above* weird, thats not how it works? no why would you think that was logical? On email lists in particular, it's etiquette to bottom-post so that your reponse is read after the question. Though the norm, through laziness and default email client configuration, and therefore the norm in the business world, is to top-post. i was confused about that because people randomly top and bottomp ost and it's obnoxious to tread through mailing lists with quoting and my email client by default cursors at the top above the reply same with webmail clients and all that unfortunately yeah :( i think it's common in the business world because it retains the entire discussion for ease of later forwarding or including others in discussion...as well, of course, as being the outlook default i'll occasionally break out by replying with something like "comments inline below" where it makes sense to insert them inline Sure inline comments are perfectly acceptable (sometimes even preferred). But I don't see how top-p[os damnit keyboard... But I don't see how bottom-posting fails to preserve the conversation if you keep the entire thread intact, sure but it's more common to include only the parts relevant to what you're replying I think the differentiation is business email: People are lazy, go with the default, don't usually bother to cutout the 100-message long trail. list mail: People are compelled to follow the rules and go to the effort of a succinct reply instead of having to forward twenty previous emails from a discussion where that has happened, the habit with top-posting is to preserve the entire discussion below that's likely true i find top-posting on lists awful if it's anything other than a quick response to something but again, if everyone followed the same behavior in work emails as mailing lists, to bring someone up to speed on a discussion i'd have to forward many emails instead of one so in this use case, it serves me well Of course forwarding the full email chain is very easy in some email clients (eg Gmail) FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE Now Available up_the_irons: Thanks! I wonder how long before I am CCNP certified mnathani: CCNP is like 3 exams :( staticsafe: right. I am hoping to complete them within a year good luck! Thanks :-) mnathani && staticsafe; would CCNA(not CCNP) be very difficult with someone with absolutely no prior Cisco experience(or any experience in related fields) but with a good grasp oF *nix knowledge? in your opinions of course :) no not really but you should read up on the material yeah I am planning on that I have just over a month before it starts I'm quite nervous :X nesta: CCNA is the associate level, so it gives you like an introduction to all the basic topics. You can do most of the labs using PacketTracer software by cisco. Should not be too difficult if you already command line driven with *nix knowledge. okay thanks mnathani. I'm a command line junkie on *nix but some of the terminology and stuff with the Cisco threw me off a bit but I suppose *nix did the same when I first encountered it :-) up_the_irons: Do you have any cisco / juniper certs?