Crime writer. Many of those crimes involve computers.
nixCraft has posted a review of Tarsnap Mastery: Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid.
nixCraft makes a deliberate practice of listing pros and cons for each book they review. This is a good idea. The only con that they list is that “you most definitely need some basic Unix command-line knowledge.”
I can live with that. If you can’t use a command line, you shouldn’t be using Tarsnap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
