Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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“FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” early draft available!

You can now get the in-progress but complete first draft of “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” at Tilted Windmill Press.

Buy it now, get 10% off. You get access to the early version as a PDF. When the final book is released, you’ll get the final EPUB, mobi, and print PDF versions.

This draft contains all the content I intend for this book, but it has not been tech reviewed. Tech reviewers have received the manuscript, and are busily marking all the ways that I am wrong, wrong, wrong.

The final print book will have a wraparound cover that looks much like below, with minor changes to accommodate the actual spine width. In my unbiased opinion, this is the most fantastic cover I’ve done.

fmspf cover
fmspf cover
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Inaugural SemiBUG meeting notes

Last night was the first semibug.org meeting, at the Hazel Park Raceway. Eleven people attended.

The next meeting will be at 7:00 PM, 1715 December 2015, at the Hazel Park Raceway.

The fourth floor of the HPR clubhouse was actually quite suitable for a user group meeting. HPR has horse races on Friday and Saturday night during spring and summer, but this time of year it relies on live videos of races in warm places. We had a conference table, but wound up sitting in chairs in a big circle while we hashed out what happened. The HPR staff was friendly and welcoming.

The discussions would have taken weeks of email, but we hashed everything out in about an hour.

I admitted that I’ve been acting as chairman, and asked if anyone else wanted the job. Nobody does. I’ll try it for a while, see what happens.

We’ve decided to try a couple different locations in the next few months and see what suits us best. Because of the holidays, we’re sticking with HPR in December.

We pillaged other user group agendas, and settled on a general meeting format.

  • Open with welcome and abuse of new members. (STeve Andre’ arrived immediately after this rule was adopted, so he was the first to be welcomed and abused.)
  • Jobs offered and needed
  • Tech questions (no answers, mind you. Just questions. People who have the answers can seek you out at the end of the meeting.)
  • Presentation. One presentation a night. Presentations are to be BSD-related, but the goal is to show things we don’t know about. Interoperability and integration are great topics.

    And we adjourned to Bangkok Cuisine for babble. Which makes this the first BSD event I’ve been at in twenty years where beer was not involved.

    We have presentations for our next four meeting.

  • December – Josh Grosse on bulk building stable packages on OpenBSD
  • January – Mary Tomich on GhostBSD
  • February – STeve Andre’ on OpenBSD at Michigan State University
  • March – Lucas on something with FreeBSD filesystems, dunno what yet

    SemiBUG presentations are NOT RECORDED at this time.

    Four months of presentations sounds good to start, but the first presentations will be the easiest.

    If we wind up staying at the HPR, during the summer we’ll probably do a “SemiBUG Friends and Family Visit the Horse Races” on a Friday or Saturday night, because nobody except Paul (who arranged the space) had ever seen one.

    Oh, and one night we need to have the “My Home Network Is Worse than Your Home Network” game show. Just how many VLANs does an apartment need, anyway?

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    first semibug.org meeting next Tuesday

    The first meeting for theSoutheast Michigan BSD User Group, aka SEMIBUG, will be next Tuesday, 17 November 2015, at the Hazel Park Raceway restaurant.

    We’ll discuss what sort of meeting we want, when the regular meeting will happen, where it will be, and suchlike. We’ll probably also draft someone to fix the website. (By fix, I mean “burn it to the ground and try again.”)

    The restaurant menu is very minimal thanks to the season, but after the meeting interested parties can head out to one of the local places for actual food. Buy a soda or a beer at HPR to justify our presence.

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    Detroit-area BSD user group, take 2

    Fifteen years ago, I tried to organize a BSD user group in southeast Michigan.

    That effort failed because of a lack of a steady place to meet.

    The memory of that failure has faded with time. So I’m trying again. This time, the Southeast Michigan BSD User Group, or SEMIBUG, has a web site and a mailing list.

    We still need to find a place to meet consistently, but I’m more confident that a few of us working together can do so. Mainly because I’m an optimistic idiot.

    So, if you’re in the Detroit area: sign up for the mailing list, help us figure out the details.

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    freebsd-update: “/usr/sbin/freebsd-update: cannot open files/.gz: No such file or directory”

    This morning, I finally updated my web server to FreeBSD 10.2-p6 using freebsd-update. Normally I like freebsd-update, but this morning it decided to be cranky.

    As usual, it was cranky because I didn’t know what I was doing.

    First, I should say that I don’t need to update my hosts that often. If there’s, say, a mountd(8) security advisory, I don’t bother. And when I ran bunches of FreeBSD boxes, I ran freebsd-update through ansible.

    This means I’m not terribly familiar with the output.

    So, I run:

    # freebsd-update -F -r 10.2-RELEASE upgrade

    There’s the usual “downloading metadata” messages, then a bunch of stuff on updating patches.

    I then get presented with an /etc/mail/sendmail.cf diff, saying some of the innards of that file has changed. Fine.

    Then I get:

    The following file will be removed, as it no longer exists in
    FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE: /etc/ntp.conf
    Does this look reasonable (y/n)?

    Wait… FreeBSD dropped /etc/ntp.conf? What, did they drop ntpd? Who do they think they are, OpenBSD? I’m sure that’s in the release notes, had I bothered to read the release notes. Fine, I’ll install openntpd from packages after the upgrade. No biggie. But I want /etc/ntp.conf to stick around, as I have custom twiddles in there. I think. It’s been a while.

    So I answer n. Just like I would with mergemaster.

    And freebsd-update ends.

    Fine. That’s all the updates, right? I saw stuff download. I then do:

    # freebsd-update install
    No updates are available to install.
    Run '/usr/sbin/freebsd-update fetch' first.

    What fresh hell is this? I saw all sorts of stuff download!

    I rerun the freebsd-update command, and this time I notice in the output:

    /usr/sbin/freebsd-update: cannot open files/.gz: No such file or directory

    Something’s missing.

    I add -F, to say “hey, re-download everything.”

    Same result.

    Eventually, I let freebsd-update take /etc/ntp.conf. The upgrade kept running after that, downloading a bunch more stuff and finally telling me to reboot and run freebsd-update install.

    The takeaways here are:

    1) freebsd-update is not mergemaster. Answering n anywhere makes the update stop before it’s finished.
    2) Read the release notes.

    BTW, ntpd is still part of FreeBSD 10.2. I don’t know why the update wanted to blow away my ntp.conf rather than point out any diffs.

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    50% TWP titles (and more) at Kobo.com

    If you’re a Kobo user, I’ve got a heck of a deal for you. All of my Tilted Windmill Press titles, fiction and nonfiction, are available for half off with a coupon code. This includes books like FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, SSH Mastery, and Immortal Clay, but excludes my No Starch titles like Absolute FreeBSD and Absolute OpenBSD.

    It’s not just my books either. All self-published titles are eligible.

    Here’s the coupon codes and eligible dates, by country.

    Canada:
    October 28th – October 31st
    Promo Code: CA50SALE

    United States/Australia/New Zealand
    October 27th – October 30th
    Promo Code: GET50SALE

    United Kingdom
    October 30th – November 2nd
    Promo Code: UK50SALE

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    SSH talk, 10 November 2015

    I’ll be at the Farmington Hills Public Library for the mug.org meeting on 10 November 2015, talking about SSH.

    The talk will be pretty much based on SSH Mastery, as you might expect.

    Meeting starts around 6:30 PM.

    The library throws us out at 9PM, at which point a bunch of us troop out to Red Lobster for dinner. You’re welcome to come too.

    MUG talks are normally filmed and available on YouTube. But you really do want to fly in from your distant continent to see this talk in person.

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    September 2015 updates

    I haven’t done a general update since June? Well, let’s give where things are at the end of September. Because it’s October, and for my whole career my status reports have always been behind, and I see no reason to change now.

    FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS is underway. Right now it’s in Allan Jude’s capable hands, but Allan has this thing called a “day job.” Apparently when you’re the It should be out before the end of the year.

    In the meantime I’m mining words for FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems. It covers NFS, nullfs, NTFS, and even filesystems not beginning with N. (Can’t think of what those are offhand, but I’m sure there are some.)

    Immortal Clay 2, or Kipuka Blues, is at the line editor. So I’m waiting on that.

    I’m spending 60-90 minutes a day on a new project called “Butterfly Stomp Waltz.” This started as a short story but, well, things happened–mainly that the folks who read it demanded the rest of the story. (Those of you eager for the new nonfiction books: if I stop writing fiction, my tech writing speed plunges. So this is to your benefit too.)

    I suspect the next tech books will be on PAM, then something on OpenBSD httpd/relayd. (I’d really like to see httpd ported to more operating systems before I do that book, though.) I do intend to head towards the FreeBSD jails book, but after spending a year on FreeBSD filesystems I feel a definite need to poke elsewhere for a while.

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    Reviews and Interviews

    Two chunks of news on my tech books yesterday:

    1) nixCraft’s Wendy Michele wrote a very nice review of FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. Apparently I need to send her a copy of the ZFS book (which I’m perfectly okay with doing).

    2) BSDTalk 2^8 discusses FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS. Recorded at vBSDCon, my coauthor Allan Jude does a good job talking about the book. Fortunately, someone came into the room before they were quite finished, cutting the interview short before Will could ask “What was it like working with Lucas?”