Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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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.

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Sudo talk now on YouTube

My talk Sudo: You’re Doing It Wrong is now live on YouTube. (Thanks to TJ for letting me know.) The talk is based on my book Sudo Mastery.

This talk went better than my NYCBSDCon talk. Probably because I hadn’t confused “buzzing with caffeine, adrenaline, and sleeplessness” with “raging tonsilitis.” The Q&A at the end took us wildly astray, and ended with the general conclusion that “Lucas needs to present to mug.org about how to use SSH correctly.”

I gave away a couple books, one Sudo Mastery and one SSH Mastery. The SSH book went to the first person to raise their hand and admit that they used passwords with SSH.

But I’m sure none of you use password-only authentication with SSH. You’re all good, decent, moral people who wouldn’t do anything that vile.

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SMLR on “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials”

The Sunday Morning Linux Review folks have a review of FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials in show 141. The review starts at about 39:30, but the whole show is worth listening to. As always.

For my own reference, here’s a couple key quotes that I’ll probably use for marketing later. (I either write them down here, or have to go listen to the show again when digging up blurb quotes later.)

“Lucas lays a solid foundation about disks.”

“The devil is in the details, and the details are in the book.”

And when it comes to slices versus partitions: Mary is right. Listen to her, guys.

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Next tech book: Tarsnap Mastery

Now that “Networking for System Administrators” is out for review, it’s time for me to dive into my next tech project: Tarsnap Mastery. Tarsnap is an encrypted online backup service run by Colin Percival, retired FreeBSD Security Officer.

Colin has asked me to write some Tarsnap documentation for years. Now that I’ve moved my personal servers from hardware in my control to “the cloud,” I need a solid backup system. Tarsnap fits the bill nicely. If I have to deploy it and get everything nicely working correctly, I’d better document it before I forget it. Otherwise, I’ll be arguing with the software when I’m trying to restore my services after a disaster.

And if I have to document it, I might as well sell the documentation to you lot. Because if you need online backups, you want them to be encrypted, right?

Tarsnap has a decent user base, and it’s growing. Tarsnap runs on everything from Mac to Minix. Hopefully, there’s enough new users to support a book. Worst case, Tarsnap Mastery can’t do any worse than DNSSEC Mastery.

As I write the Tarsnap book, I’ll be prepping to write more books on FreeBSD storage. My goal is to finish the research for one book as I finish writing another, so that I can jump directly from one project to the next. Scheduling this is something of a pain, but it’ll improve with practice.

I’ve spent today reading the entirety of the Tarsnap-users mailing list archive, wrapping my head around typical user problems and Tarsnap’s rougher edges.

I now have a headache. I blame Colin.

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“Networking for System Administrators” – Tech reviewers wanted

I’ve completed the manuscript for Networking for System Administrators. I’m now looking for a couple types of technical reviewers: people who know TCP/IP and networking, and people who are likely to read this book.

Normally I’d ask for feedback in a few weeks. But the holiday season is at our throats, and we all need to spend some time fending off the incoming pile of coal, so: I’d need your comments by 5 January 2015. If you can return it to me earlier, that’s fantastic.

If you’re interested in being a tech reviewer, please contact me via email at mwlucas at michael double-you lucas dot com, just like the domain name of my blog. (No, that’s not a literal double-you, it’s the letter w. Choke on that one, spam-bots!) Give me a sentence or two telling me what sort of reader you are and why you want to review this book.

You can read more about the tech review process at my tech reviewer information page. This is a little different because it’s a complete manuscript. Why review the whole manuscript at once? Because the Mastery books are short. At least, they’re supposed to be short (cough).

I have more detail about the book at the original announcement linked above, but here’s how the actual table of contents finished up:

0: The Problem
1: Network Layers
2: Ethernet
3: IPv4
4: IPv6
5: TCP/IP
6: Viewing Network Connections
7: Network Testing Basics
8: the Domain Name System
9: Packet Sniffing
10: Creating Traffic
11: Server Packet Filtering
12: Tracing Problems
Afterword

I expect the copyeditor to need a couple weeks with the manuscript. It should be available in print and ebook in late January.

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“FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” print available!

You can now get FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials in print on Amazon.

If you buy the print from Amazon, you can get the Kindle version for $2.99. Sadly, that’s the closest thing to a proper print/ebook combo I’ve been able to do.

For completeness’ sake: you can also buy it directly from my CreateSpace store. As sales go, that’s where I make the most money. It’s also the most expensive version. If you want to pay extra so I make more I won’t object, but I will suggest you avoid the middleman and go straight to me.

It will appear in places like Powell’s in the coming weeks.

Now to finish “Networking for Systems Administrators,” complete the design on the next tech book, finish the outline for the Immortal Clay sequel, and finish outlining the intertwined morass that is my next three FreeBSD Mastery books.

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FreeBSD fetch(1) broken on SSL links?

I went to download Tarsnap on a FreeBSD 10.0-p12 machine, and got hit with this error:

# fetch https://www.tarsnap.com/download/tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.35.tgz
Certificate verification failed for /C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=COMODO RSA Certification Authority
34380830376:error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed:/usr/src/secure/lib/libssl/../../../crypto/openssl/ssl/s3_clnt.c:1179:
fetch: https://www.tarsnap.com/download/tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.35.tgz: Authentication error

Looking at the last line of the error, you might think that Colin password-protected the Tarsnap source code. This would be extremely daft on his part, so I read on. But actually reading the message tells me that fetch(1) died because it couldn’t verify the Comodo RSA cert used on the Tarsnap web site.

Comodo has been around a long time. Why would their cert be invalid?

Second thought: Colin’s been hacked!

But no.

The third thought is the charm. Turns out that fetch in FreeBSD 10 validates SSL certificates–but doesn’t ship with an SSL root certificate! So, Colin hasn’t gone daft, or been hacked… but someone in the FreeBSD crew definitely increased my astonishment!

I installed the ca_root_cert package and created a symlink for fetch.

# ln -s /usr/local/share/certs/ca-root-nss.crt /etc/ssl/cert.pem

Fetch now worked as I expected.

It does seem that if you’re going to validate SSL certs, you should either have a decent root cert bundle installed or print a helpful error message.

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FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials at printer

Last night I received the print proofs of the new FreeBSD book.

fmse proofs

I found two errors: a missing tab in a footnote, and an extra page before the index. I’ve fixed those, double-checked the file, and sent it to the printer. It should be available in print in the next week.

I’ll have four copies at next week’s sudo talk at mug.org. Show up and you might be able to bribe me to get a copy of one of these very exclusive rare, authentic, original, limited edition books.

I’m very happy with the look of the final print. The cover is spectacular. Tech book usually have bland covers, but I decided to try something a little different. I’ll have custom covers like this on at least two other books, FM: ZFS and FM: Specialty Filesystems. (And before you ask: no, no release date yet, except “2015.”)

Three books should give me enough data to see if there’s a return on investment for fancy illustrated covers on tech books. If the book doesn’t sell well enough, I’ll fall back to more traditional tech book covers based on photographs.