Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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Patronage without Patreon

I did my year-end accounting yesterday, double-checking bank statements and receipts and credit card statements and making sure everything was in the Expenses Spreadsheet of Doom. (Doom, I say!)

My earlier financial predictions were wildly overblown, but we’re doing okay. Books take longer to write than I thought. Well, decent tech books, at least. I imagine crap books could be written pretty quickly.

More than one person has offered to support me via Patreon. The models there don’t really fit with the way I work. Some could be made to fit, but would require extra time and attention from me.

But people still want to offer me extra support. And when you’re working as a full time writer, the rule is that when someone offers you money for no good reason, you take it.

I’m pondering a per-book sponsorship, sold through my site. There would be an ebook tier and a print tier.

An ebook sponsor would get their name listed in the back of the ebook as a sponsor. They’d get a copy of the completed ebook, as well as access to in-progress drafts.

A print sponsor would get their name listed in the back of the print book and the ebook. I’d send them a copy of the ebook and a signed copy of the print book.

Sponsorship sales would remain open until the book goes to copyediting.

The question is, what would people offer as sponsorship? (The voices in my head say to charge $25 ebook and $100 print.) And are enough people interested to make it worthwhile?

I’m not entirely comfortable with this model. It shifts some risk to my sponsors. I might be attacked by a flock of rabid seagulls, or catch wheat rust, or succumb to gelato poisoning. But the sponsors know that risk.

Why post this hypothetical? I want your opinion. Would you buy some kind of sponsorship, and if so, how much would you think is fair?

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randi vs xmj

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking me for my opinion on the Randi – xmj FreeBSD issue.

Short short answer: I am withholding comment until we hear some kind of response from FreeBSD’s core team. Or until we don’t.

Short answer: This looks really bad for FreeBSD’s leaders and the Foundation.

If a volunteer project has a volunteer who is honestly so dysfunctional that he doesn’t understand why he is offensive, the project does not need him. And the volunteer needs to get help until he’s capable of behaving in a civilized manner.

edit: your hate mail may be posted. Provided I find it worthy of such treatment, at my sole discretion.

edit2: Moderating all comments on this post. Because I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments. Gamergaters are notoriously resistant to human decency.

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“FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” disclaimer

I’m going through the tech edits on FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems, integrating them into the manuscript so that it can go to copyedit.

As this book is available for early access purchase, without technical review, the manuscript starts with a disclaimer. The first step in prepping this manuscript is removing the disclaimer.

In my opinion, the disclaimers are often the most useful part of my tech books. I’m preserving this one for posterity.

FIRST DRAFT. NOT FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION. FOR TECHNICAL REVIEW ONLY. NOT FACT-CHECKED. PROBABLY COMPLETELY CHECKED OUT. SOME INFORMATION HEREIN NOT ONLY INCORRECT BUT ACTIVELY MALICIOUS, NO IDEA WHICH IS WHICH. CHEMICALLY UNSTABLE. NON-ORGANIC. CONTAINS NASTY LEECHY PLASTICS. BEWARE OF DROP BEARS, GAMERGATERS, AND SEA WEASELS. BRIDGE OUT. ONE WAY NO RETURN. MANUSCRIPT IS MORALLY BANKRUPT AND ENGAGED IN KARMIC PANHANDLING.

PLEASE SEND ANY CORRECTIONS TO THE AUTHOR. INCLUDE PAGE NUMBERS AND ENOUGH SURROUNDING CONTEXT SO HE KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. LUCAS IS ALREADY CONFUSED, PLEASE DON’T MAKE IT ANY WORSE.

You can still get the early access version of FM:SF at my bookstore, at a 10% discount. When the book is finished, you’ll get access to the final version.

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My SSH talk now on YouTube

For some value of now, that is. I just realized I forgot to post this.

My November 11, 2015 mug.org talk about SSH is now on YouTube. This is one way to lose 90 minutes.

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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.