Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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Testing Reddit Advertising for Nonfiction

The biggest boost in book sales I’ve ever seen is from when the review of FMSE went on Reddit’s sysadmin board.

Reddit has a self-serve advertising platform, with a minimum buy of $5 for 5000 impressions. I’m willing to risk $5 on an experiment.

So I now have a sponsored link on Reddit, pimping Sudo Mastery. I would post a link, except you lot would click through and mess up my impressions count. If you’re reading my blog, I’m going to assume you are aware that the book exists. If you have not bought the book, me shouting BUY MY BOOK will not change your mind.

I spent $13.75 to run this ad from 3 February to 1 March on /r/linux.

I then put $7.14 to run this ad from 3 February to 05 March on /r/bsd.

I investigated /r/sysadmin, but they didn’t have advertising space available.

So far this morning, I have 137 impressions and 2 clicks. But it’s the first day.

To break even on non-time expenses alone, I need to make $21. That’s not a huge hurdle. I did spend a couple hours on this, but most of that was figuring out how the advertising platform worked. (Hint: while the self-serv advertising platform defaults to two-day campaigns, running campaigns over a month or so gives you much more chance your campaign will be accepted. And I’m told that repeated exposure to an ad, over a long period, is more effective than a short sharp insistence.)

I am curious any of my readers who are regular Redditors happen to see the ad in the course of their normal day, however.

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“Networking for Systems Administrators” on Kindle

After more time than I expected, Networking for Systems Administrators is available on Kindle. I’ve uploaded it to Nook and Kobo as well, but they haven’t made it available yet.

The Amazon links on the book page are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I make a little extra.

I’m working on the print layout today. Print will be available ASAP.

Once I have an approved print proof, I’ll make the book available on tiltedwindmillpress.com. It’ll be another week or so, probably.

Thanks to everyone who helped to make this a better book.

And I’d especially appreciate any reviews people might have to offer. I didn’t make the ebook available before release to see if it affected my visibility on Amazon. (Rumor claims that initial sales velocity impacts a book’s visibility.) According to those same rumor mills, the number of purchaser reviews in the first week disproportionately impact ongoing visibility.

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Word doc placed in Indesign gets numbered headings

This has bit me more than once, and according to Google it affects nobody else on the whole Internet. Do I feel special or what?

I write books in Microsoft Word, using Styles. Paragraph and character styles are essential for producing electronic and print books.

At random times, when I import a Word doc into Indesign for print layout, numbers appear before the headings. These numbers do not appear in the Word document. Resolving this problem drives me near to madness.

InDesign and Word both have features to number chapters and sections. The “place document” process somehow tickles one of them just right to activate this behavior.

To get rid of it:

  • Go into the Word doc.
  • Modify the problem Style.
  • Select Format
  • Go to Numbering
  • Select a numbering scheme, and immediately select “no numbering.”
  • Save the doc

    You can now import without numbered headings mysteriously appearing.

    Recording this for my future reference will hopefully vaccinate me against ever having this problem again. That’s what disaster preparations are for, after all!

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    “Tarsnap Mastery” pre-pub reviewers wanted

    The first draft of “Tarsnap Mastery” is ready for pre-pub review.

    Colin has reviewed the manuscript, so I’m fairly sure that the technical stuff is correct. But Colin knows Tarsnap very well, so he read the book already understanding what I’m trying to teach.

    And in aggregate, y’all use Tarsnap much more than I possibly could. There’s thousands of you. You’ve probably figured out ways to abuse the service that I would have never thought of.

    If you’re interested in doing a pre-pub review, send me an email with the subject “Tarsnap pre-pub review.” Please give me a sentence or two saying:

  • how experienced you are as a sysadmin
  • how experienced you are at Tarsnap

    I can’t take everyone who volunteers, but I want to get a fair balance between different levels of sysadmin and Tarsnap experience.

    The book draft PDF is 16MB. Send your message from an email address that can accept a file that large. If the email bounces, I’ll assume that you didn’t read this far in the instructions, and hence don’t really want to review.

    Please send any comments in plain text. I don’t look at comments until the due date, so one big response is fine.

    I’ll need any comments back by 9 February 2015.

    If you want more detail on pre-pub reviews, look at my web site.

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    FreeBSD Jail Management Tools

    To design “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” I need to look at the existing jail management tools. Jails have been around about fifteen years now, and FreeBSD has accumulated a whole bunch of wrappers and supporting tools. Many of these have wound up in the ports collection.

    Jails have evolved over the years. Some of these add-on tools are not useful for FreeBSD 9.1 and later.

    Here’s a few things I discovered in my research. I’m hoping that you lot will offer your own comments and help me decide which tools to cover in the book.

    It seems we have five major jail management toolkits.

  • ezjail – perhaps the best known jail management tool. Written entirely in shell.
  • qjail – Designed for managing lots of jails at the command line, based on templates. The examples use ipfilter, which is my third choice of FreeBSD firewall. Does not need ZFS.
  • iocage – supports resource limiting, thin provisioning, cloning, and either vimage or NAT from the host’s main IP.
  • jadm – Python-based jail command shell, uses a bridge interface. Can migrate jails between hosts. ZFS integration. Lets you set global settings for all jails, per-jail settings, jail groups, and so on.
  • cbsd – web-based management of jails. Supports HAST, migration, CARP, etc.

    The question for me is: which should I cover in the jails book? I’ll mention that all of them exist, but I can only give attention to one or two.

    CBSD seems an obvious choice. It integrates CARP and HAST and vimage and just about everything. Plus, people like web GUIs. It seems to be the giant ape of jail management tools.

    But I want to cover a command-line toolkit. Between ezjail, qjail, iocage, and jadm, I find myself leaning towards iocage.

    There’s some other jail-related software in the ports collection. Here’s those I plan to investigate and possibly include. I might find that their functionality is now included in mainline FreeBSD, however.

  • jps and jtop – external wrappers that add jail info to ps and top.
  • jkill – shuts down a running jail and all its processes from outside the jail. I don’t know that this is still needed, but the functionality is important.
  • bsnmp-jails – feed jail info into snmpd.

    Here are some jail-related ports I don’t plan to include, and why.

  • py-ploy_ezjail, bsdploy – ploy for jails. I don’t ploy.
  • py-ezjailremote – a python wrapper around ezjail. I don’t Python.
  • p5-BSD-Jail-Object – a Perl interface for jail management. I do Perl, but… no.
  • pkg_jail – build packages inside a jail. This looks like an old poudriere.
  • jailrc – improved startup/shutdown scripts for pre-9.1 jails. The key words here are “pre 9.1.”
  • pam_jail – drops the user into a jail upon successful login
  • jailme – a modified version of jexec with more sanity checking. Is setuid, lets normal users run jails.
  • jaildaemon – lets the jail talk to the host? I’m sure this solved a problem for someone, but not me.
  • jailctl – for FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x
  • jailaudit – portaudit for inside jails. I’d say this is superceded by pkg audit.
  • jail2 – advanced jail script. Uses /etc/jail.conf. I’m kinda, sorta sure that this or its descendant is the default FreeBSD 9.1 and later.
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    Jan 2015 Status & Next Projects

    Welcome to 21 January 2015. Here’s the news.

    I finished the first draft of Tarsnap Mastery yesterday. Today I went through it one more time, then shipped it off to Colin Percival for his comments on the last few chapters. Once I have his corrections, I’ll solicit reviewers.

    Networking for Systems Administrators is at the copyeditor. It’s due back Friday. I expected this book to be pretty easy, but the tech reviewers savaged it. The end result will be a much better book, but it still wasn’t much fun and took longer to repair than I expected. With any luck, though, I’ll be able to get the electronic version out before the end of January and print in mid-February.

    These two books are not available for pre-order through the Tilted Windmill Press web site. Books that I offer direct pre-orders on have done much more poorly than books without direct pre-orders. (Part of that might be topics, of course.) Other authors tell me that Amazon uses a book’s initial sales velocity to compute a book visibility to other buyers. More than 90% of my TWP book sales come from Amazon, so I care what happens on that platform.

    The sequel to Immortal Clay is rolling along.

    Now that Tarsnap Mastery and Networking for System Administrators are in a lull, I’ve started seriously pulling material together and filling in the outlines for my next FreeBSD Mastery books:

  • Jails (#fmjail)
  • ZFS (#fmzfs)
  • Specialty Filesystems (#fmspf, because #fmsf is taken)

    If you watched my most recent BSDNow interview, this is not a surprise.

    The books will assume you know what’s in FM: Storage Essentials, and there is a certain amount of interconnection between all three. For example, to use jails you should know about devfs and unionfs. The Jails book will include the incantations to perform the devfs and unionfs tasks needed for jails, but the explanations for them will be in the Specialty Filesystems book. Similarly, the Jails book will have ZFS rituals in it, but the ZFS book will have the knowledge behind those rituals.

    So, if you know some of these systems but not all you only need buy exactly what you need.

    I might split the Specialty Filesystems book into two parts, one for local filesystems and one for networked filesystems, depending on how long the book gets and the final content. My goal for these books is to make them about 30,000-40,000 words.[1] FMSE was 45,000 words, and N4SA is about that long. The sudo and Tarsnap books are closer to 30K, while SSH is right around 35K.

    I expect that once I finish them, I’ll have a bundle at Tilted Windmill Press much like the existing Security Bundle.

    When will these be finished? I really want to take the finished print books to BSDCan in June.

    [1] Why restrict book length? While the various ebook platforms do not restrict how long books can be, they do restrict how much I can charge for them. Most traditional publishers do not have that restriction. I must stagger roughly around that fuzzy intersection between “give good value,” “include what the reader needs,” and “can’t pay the mortgage.”

    Note that the on-demand printers do limit the size of print books. The bindings at the larger size books are not great. I refuse to release shoddy print books.

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    Two “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” reviews

    Two new reviews on FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials yesterday.

    First, from Justin Sherrill, on DragonflyBSD Digest.

    Then on Slashdot, which got featured on Reddit, from Saint Aardvark the Carpeted. (The nice thing about the Internet is, even a carpeted aardvark can make his mark on it.)

    I’d like to thank both gentlemen for taking the time to review my latest. Reviews from disinterested third parties can make or break an author.

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    BSDCan 2015 Call for Papers Ending Soon

    I just submitted a talk and a tutorial to BSDCan 2015.

    If you’ve done anything in BSD technology over the last year more sophisticated than “maintained respiration and blood flow,” you should submit as well.

    As a committee member, I can say we are always looking for unusual work. Yes, we all know that Henning Brauer is working on OpenBSD, and Luigi Rizzo is doing something clever with the network stack, and Max Stucchi is pimping IPv6. That’s all well and good, but we always want something outside our usual suspects. You’re the network administrator of a salt mine, or the frozen North, or an oil rig? You’ve wedged BSD into an alarm clock? Submit! Tell us about it!

    Otherwise, they’re gonna let that Lucas character talk. Again. Nobody wants that.

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    Volunteering Early to Tech Review

    Another “write this once so I can refer to it later” post. If I sent you a link to this post, it’s probably because you asked to tech review a book before I’m ready for tech reviewers.

    This week, I received several requests from readers who want to do a pre-publication tech review of one of my new books, like Tarsnap Mastery or next year’s FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS. Generally these readers are enthusiastic fans who get confused between “Lucas released a new book” and “Christmas.”

    I need fans like you. Seriously. You’re my best hope of staying in business as a writer.

    When you send me that email, I do hang on to it until the book needs a tech reviewer. But my email is a tarry morass. Like the La Brea Tar Pits, it often sucks down the innocent. The further in advance you ask, the more likely I am to lose your email. The precise traits that give my books their character make email management difficult.

    Should it be otherwise? Yep. I wish it was. But I’ve decided to stop fighting it.

    I always announce requests for tech reviewers here, on this blog.

    I’ve also observed that the further ahead people ask, the more likely it is that the volunteer can’t provide any feedback. Being free in December means nothing for your availability in February.

    Also, I can only handle a limited number of tech reviewers. I specify the criteria when I ask for reviewers. For example, in Networking for Systems Administrators I wanted about half ignorant readers and half knowledgeable network people. I asked people to specify which they were in their offer. For #n4sa I wound up with a lot of experienced volunteers and not so many ignorant ones so I needed to solicit more newbies (which I did find, so don’t go volunteering now).

    Your early request doesn’t have the information I need to choose you or not. When I solicit volunteers, I’ll reply to your original offer with a link to my solicitation post.

    But the best way to be chosen as a tech reviewer on a specific book is to watch my blog. Offer to tech review at the time I’m ask for tech reviewers, with the information I ask for in the request.