Author: Michael Lucas

This See the Sausage Being Made post goes to Patronizers in February and becomes public in March. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File, freshly updated for the new edition of Networking for System Administrators.

Yes, I just published a StSbM post last week, but I need to get back on track and I have news.

Most importantly, I’m making some words. The writing in the original ZFS books isn’t bad, but it could be better, so generally applicable ZFS discussion is getting redrafted. The FreeNAS miniXL makes a fine test server, and I’m even discovering FreeBSD bugs through bhyve. (The docs say you can install FreeBSD 15 with 256 MBRAM, but for a ZFS install you need at least 350MB to install from packages on ISO. I’d call this a doc bug rather than an OS bug, because if you’re running ZFS on a host with less than 350MB RAM you’re daft, but reducing pkg(8) memory usage is worthwhile.) I’m fixing some of the inconsistencies and standardizing language for certain concepts and tools, which I really should have done the first time around but nobody noticed so I guess we got away with it and that’s all that matters.

The challenge for this book? Linux. ZFS considers Linux a Tier 1 platform, but Linux does not consider ZFS a Tier 1 filesystem. ZFS works. You can install it. But there’s no standard way to use ZFS as a root filesystem on Linux. Many people maintain constantly evolving hacks to support ZFS on root. Some variants added support to the installer only to remove it. Proxmox uses ZFS as its primary filesystem, but very few people run Proxmox on their laptop. I think the majority of the book must assume that Linux users have their root on extFS and data disks with ZFS. It seems that ZFSBootMenu is the current leading Linux ZFS boot manager, so I’ll probably do a final chapter discussing that. Such chapters are the shortest-lived part of any book. Putting it at the end makes it easy to ignore when it becomes obsolete.

Which brings me to the big reason for posting this now: Eddie Sharam sent me the cover art. Behold, an ancient Mediterranean vase.

This is an actual painting, available for sale once the book is released, probably as part of the Kickstarter. I pay Eddie reasonably for his work, but making a living as a visual artist is even more fraught than making a living as a writer. If he can get a few bucks more, I’m all for it. Central front and back images mean that we’ll have to do some digital manipulation to make the spine work on the hardcover, but Eddie’s down with that. (No, I don’t digitally alter images. That would require visual skills I have no desire to develop.)

Last month’s cleaning efforts highlighted a problem that’s a decade in the making: my surplus copies warehouse.

The printer screwed up on the N4SA2e special editions, shipping me 32 regular hardcovers with the special dust jackets. I couldn’t use those for Patronizers, sponsors, or Kickstarters. They did, however, overwhelm my ability to ignore these shelves and force me to face reality. I need to do something with these.

The good news is, crowdfunding forced me to solve the problems of shipping.

I’m going to add them to the TWP bookstore, signed, at list price.

Parts of it will be clunky, because WooCommerce shipping is arcane and inflexible. I hired expert help to solve this problem. They failed, so I’m not investing more effort therein. All shipping will happen on Mondays, unless I fry my brain and can only perform a mechanical task. But between good shipping envelopes, a label printer, and my newfound skill in tape gun reloading, it’s manageable.

I have a handful of tech books, a whole bunch of Prohibition Orcs, and a scattering of novels. The troublesome one will be the chapbooks. I might do a “random chapbook, $5” add-on item. Short story roulette, anyone?

Patronizers, you get dibs. If there’s something you want, drop me a note.

Somewhere in here, I have to set up the 1 April Kickstarter. Yes, I’m doing another one. I promise it’ll be stupid. You might laugh. A handful of you will leap at it, probably as a gag gift. But it’ll amuse me as I’m scrabbling through the ZFS book.

I’m also looking at the production tools for the tech book after OpenZFS. The first edition of SSH Mastery was originally laid out in LaTeX. The PDF looked great. I sent it to the print-on-demand networks. Some indie printer, somewhere in the world, choked on its lack of Adobe-specific and Microsoft-specific gunk. The book was pulled from distribution globally because one location had trouble. I had to hire someone to redesign it in Adobe InDesign, and quickly. Afterwards, I had to dive into the InDesign gutter myself.

That was sixteen years ago.

Are those printers still running in Farawayistan? Perhaps.

But other people are reporting good results replacing both Adobe and Microsoft Office with LibreOffice in producing complicated books. I’m seriously considering trying it for the next tech book. This has risks. If one printer in Farawayistan can’t print the book, distributors will yank the book from distribution globally. I’ll have to redo the book in InDesign, and perhaps even in Office. Sponsors and Kickstarter backers have changed buying patterns, though. I need to produce books for signing in the US, and books for dropship in the US, UK, and Australia. My printer (today) is Ingram. Ingram maintains its printers in those locations quite well. I expect to print those easily.

Worst case: I release book for wide distribution, some printer can’t handle it. I redo it in LibreOffice/InDesign. If that fails, I convert everything to Office and InDesign and start over. My hardcore readers will get the book on time. The rest of the world waits an extra month for print.

The worrisome thing is opening old InDesign files, but I have a license for the Affinity suite. Not the new subscription model, not the newer freeware trap, an actual “you bought this software and can use it forever” license.

Truly, I’d love to be rid of Adobe. And Microsoft. And Adobe. Adobe.

I better sign off before I choke on my own rage. Thank you all for your support, it means the world to me–especially in these times.

This See the Sausage Being Made post goes to Patronizers in January and becomes public in February. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File, freshly updated for the new edition of Networking for System Administrators.

I have one “job.” Yes, I write books. I get paid for that. But the thing I get a “paycheck” for is writing one blog post a month, at the beginning of the month. For Patronizers.

Here we are at January 28, and I am just getting to writing that blog post.

Absolutely zero excuses, only a procedural failure.

I like to write the blog post when something happens. What happened in the last six weeks?

Nothing.

Well, there’s The Longest Dark, the orcish solstice holiday. I took time off for that. Come January, I started to get to work and realized that my test lab was, at best, suboptimal. Many of the topics I write about can be tested and deployed on virtual machines, but I like to do filesystem books on real hardware or at least real disks. I have a host for that–it’s old, but who cares? Disks are disks, and this thing has eight SATA drives and a couple SATADOMs for the OS. Eight drives lets me test most common ZFS configurations. The host is large and noisy, but I have a basement and it has a BMC so I can kick it as needed. Creating a hard drive failure means two flights of stairs and opening a case, but I can live with that.

Mind you, I had stolen some of the hard drives for other purposes. More drives were needed. I descended into the Parts Closet. Well, I call it the Parts Closet. Other people call it a trash heap, or perhaps a Do-It-Yourself Toxic Gas Cloud Kit, Add Your Own Fire. Old computers, old printers, all precariously balanced. Laptops preinstalled with Windows XP with wobbly lids, cat5 wire crimping kits, pristine Unicomp Model M keyboards with button mice, Keyboardio Model 100s with Dvorak keycaps, a wall of small storage boxes with labels like SOEKRIS and PCCARD and SCSI TERMINATORS. The POWER OVER ETHERNET box sits right next to ETHERNET OVER POWER, which I do recommend as a convenient trick if the electrical system in your home doesn’t date from 1949 and wasn’t engineered by a PTSD-stricken pipefitter with delusions of grounding. (Fortunately cable TV is historical, so I can run Ethernet over the old coax someone paid big money to install.) Once I started digging for hard drives and discovered several expensive 250GB IDE disks, the necessity of a purge overcame my unwillingness to perform said purge.

Finding the cable crimpers reminded me that I needed to check some of the long-haul cabling in the house. The cable tester showed that I shouldn’t ask questions I don’t want answered.

Now let’s detour into backups.

I have a iX Systems miniXL running FreeNAS for local backups, and rely on Dropbox and Tarsnap for external backups. All the backups get tested monthly, mainly because I routinely screw up and must recover from backup. The miniXL also serves as my MP3 storage, because cleaning out the parts closet demands a soundtrack.

Naturally, I’m halfway through the ghastly purge when the music dies.

The miniXL’s boot SATADOM was no longer a boot device in the BIOS.

Fine. I’ve never worked with SATADOM hardware before, but how bad could it be? I ordered an inexpensive replacement.

The Supermicro power cable didn’t fit. Apparently that’s a well-known example of vendor lock-in, so I ordered a more expensive guaranteed compatible Supermicro SATADOM that was not at all compatible and immediately went back to the dealer. Fortunately, some ex-iX folks mentioned that the miniXL had space for an SSD. I had found a couple SSDs in the Parts Closet.

But then I realized that the miniXL has eight removable hard drive bays, is much quieter than my test system, and would easily fit under my standing desk (pic). Causing a hard drive failure with this host doesn’t require going to the basement and opening a case.

The critical service, music, is now being shared from my Mac desktop.

Backups? I have external USB cases for local hosts to back up to. I used the FreeNAS box because it was there. The miniXL is now running raw FreeBSD 15 and bhyve.

I now have a less unsuitable test environment and the toxic waste accident has been relocated from my home to the recycling center. Well, technically, I’ve converted one large toxic waste accident into two smaller accidents and added one of those accidents to a full scale disaster, but I’m not responsible for that disaster so I’m going to be a good citizen and ignore it.

In other news: last month I said I had completed fulfillment of the new Networking for System Administrators by packing and shipping a few hundred books. Uh… not so much. Yes, I finished packing the books. The US Postal Service hauled them off my porch. All good?

No.

More than one backer contacted me to say that their books were weirdly delayed. The USPS hauled my overseas books from Detroit to the big processing center Chicago, where most of them sat for a month. A handful ricocheted between Chicago and NYC for weeks. Several folks told me that this is unacceptable. I agree. I have no leverage nor any ability to fix this, however. My country is increasingly hostile to small business. I’m pretty sure that if I used USPS’ expensive two-day shipping, they would arrive speedily. I could use UPS or Fedex, except they’re expensive and might charge $50 to collect $3 in VAT depending on criteria so complicated as to be effectively unpredictable.

There’s also been other surprises. US Export Compliance returned one package because they require a full recipient name. A recipient like “A D Smith” is not acceptable; the shipping label must spell out Anonymous Doof. I’d expect the destination address to establish an internal protocol for demultiplexing initials, but apparently my government needs to know exactly who backs me. This has never been a problem before, but fine, rules change and there’s probably an announcement somewhere.

All I can think of to do is: warnings on my crowdfunding campaigns. Lots of warnings.

Much like I do when I warn you Patronizers that backing me is a terrible deal. January had no progress, but many tiny fixes. Yes, yes, that’s its own kind of progress but it doesn’t get words on the page. I do appreciate y’all. Thank you.