“Sudo Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

Thursday night, I finished the first draft of Sudo Mastery. Today, I went through the manuscript, removed my known tics, discovered a few more tics that needed killing, cleaned up bits and pieces, and now have a work ready for technical review.

Which is where you lot come in. I’m looking for people with sudo experience to read the book and tell me where I’ve screwed up. My screw-ups usually come in two flavors:

1) I’m technically wrong.
2) I use something in a way other people don’t
3) I don’t include something important, because I’ve never used it.

The goal of Sudo Mastery is not to get 100% of my readers to 100% sudo expertise, but instead to get 90% of my readers everything they will need. The remaining 10% will get a solid grounding in sudo and pointers on solving their particularly pernicious edge cases. The idea is roughly similar to my other Mastery books or Cisco Routers for the Desperate.

The contents of Sudo Mastery are:

1. Introduction
2. sudo and sudoers
3. editing and testing sudoers
4. lists and aliases
5. options and defaults
6. shell escapes, editors, and sudoers policies
7. configuring sudo
8. user environments versus sudo
9. sudo for intrusion detection
10. sudoers distribution and complex policies
11. security policies in ldap
12. logging & debugging
13. authentication

Most of these chapters are short. And much of the writing needs rewriting. But there’s no point in rewriting until I know the content is technically correct.

If you know sudo, if you consider yourself a sudo master already, this is your chance to spread your wisdom. Read my general notes for tech reviewers, and email me at mwlucas at michael w lucas dotcom. (The W is vastly important… you might get a response from the domain without one, but it won’t be what you expected.)

I plan to send out manuscripts over the next week. I’m asking for people to return their comments on or before 5 October. I plan to revise the manuscript the week of 6 October and get it to the copyeditor before the 15th.

With anything resembling luck, the completed book will be available before Thanksgiving. I’d really like to have the holidays off this year.