Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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Sudo talk at mug.org, 9 Dec 2014

I’ll be talking at mug.org in Farmington Hills, MI, on 9 December 2014.

The topic is Sudo: You’re Doing It Wrong. If you use sudo, you need to show up for this. Because you’re doing it wrong. It’s based on Sudo Mastery, as you might guess.

Come to mug.org. They have cookies.

They usually record and show their talks, so if you can’t be bothered to go to Farmington Hills in December you can probably catch it on YouTube later. But it won’t be nearly as awesome.

Also, I’m planning to go to the IT in the D casual social event on 20 November 2014. I’m not speaking, just hanging out. Why?

Now that I’m a full time writer, this is my staff.
Tilted Windmill Press staff
They’re perfectly sociable, and definitely cuter than most of my previous co-workers, but they’re a little short in the techie conversation department.

So, yeah. Two chances to see me in the near future. No public appearances planned afterwards. I’ll be busy trying to teach my staff how to copyedit.

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And today, on Audible…

What? Lucas linking to an audiobook? What the heck?

My aversion to audiobooks is pretty well known (I don’t object to you listening to them, just don’t ask me to). But yep, I’m going to point you at Audible today.

John Campbell’s classic novella, Who Goes There, is on sale at Audible.com today for $0.99.

Less than a week ago, I put out a novel that owes certain literary debts to this classic SF work. It’s three-quarters of a century old, and certainly bears signs of the age it was written in, but when I first read it (decades ago) it left scars that endured until… well, until I had to write a novel about those scars.

Had I known this sale was coming, I would have… I dunno. Contacted Audible and begged for co-marketing? Something. Something cool.

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FreeBSD “Working copy ‘/usr/src’ locked.”

Poul-Henning Kamp is working with me on some GBDE fixes. Which means he sends me patches and says “Here, try this,” along with very valuable exposition on how GBDE works and the threat model it applies to. This means I’m updating frequently.

My usual update process is:

# cd /usr/src
# make update && make -j8 buildworld && make -j8 kernel && reboot

Half a second after typing this, I realized I’d forgotten to apply PHK’s latest patch. I hit CTRL-C during the make update before building an unsuitable userland. I need to do the source update, apply the patch, and then build everything.

# make update
--------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Updating /usr/src using Subversion
--------------------------------------------------------------
svn: E155004: Run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for det
ails)
svn: E155004: Working copy '/usr/src' locked.
svn: E155004: '/usr/src' is already locked.
*** Error code 1

Stop.
make[1]: stopped in /usr/src
*** Error code 1

Fine. svn cleanup it is. But wait–I don’t have svn installed!

As a matter of principle, I don’t want to install svn on this test box. svnlite is what FreeBSD offers to users, so it should be able to handle everything.

The good news is, svnlite also have a cleanup feature.

# svnlite cleanup
# make update

And the update proceeds as I would hope.

Is this worth a PR to get the error message changed? Dunno. What do you think?

Now all I must do is master all the GBDE wisdom PHK dumped in my brain…

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New novel out: “Immortal Clay”

Most of you follow me for nonfiction, but this book just came out, so I’m gonna tell you about it anyway.

My SF novel, Immortal Clay, just hit Kobo and Amazon. It’s in process at other outlets like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and so on, and print is forthcoming.

I’d describe this book as an alien invasion tale like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing, set after we lose.

You can read the opening on my web site. Or you can jump straight to Kobo or Amazon and buy it sight unseen. I’m good either way.

And Ben Baldwin did an absolutely amazing cover. I mean… wow! Click on the preview and take a look. If you have a big screen, look at the high-res version.

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Next Project: “Networking for Sysadmins”

FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is out for tech review. (If you’re reading the pre-pub book, you’ve got a few more days to get comments back to me.) I’ll then make the corrections and send it to copyediting.

So I’m writing another book.

The current title is Networking for System Administrators. (I’d like to work the word “Mastery” in there, but it sounds artificially kludged together, because it would be.) It’s a small book, readable in a couple hours.

I’ve worked in a whole bunch of IT organizations as both a system administrator and a network administrator. In most of them I get sucked into a bridge role because I can speak to both teams in their own language.

It’s hard to teach a network administrator to be a sysadmin. An enterprise often runs a dozen or more different operating system, and who knows how many variants of each. Plus, each team might configure their differently. “You need a password to sudo here, you need a Yubikey to log on here, you need a hole in the head to log on here…” oy vey! Asking a network administrator to learn all this is like asking a sysadmin to configure Cisco, RouterOS, and OpenBSD routers. It just isn’t going to happen.

But the basic principles of networking isn’t hard, and understanding basic networking can save the sysadmin so much time. A sysadmin who wants to learn networking is often referred to books like The TCP/IP Guide or TCP/IP Illustrated. These are awesome books, and some systems administrators (and all non-web app developers) need to read them. For the majority of sysadmins, they’re overkill. An enterprise database administrator who needs to understand TCP/IP window scaling to do his job should call his network administrator.

Instead, most sysadmins learn networking via occasional blog posts, Google searches, and oral tradition. This is a ghastly way to learn any technical topic.

The result? Calls the sysadmin doesn’t want to make and the network administrator doesn’t want to get.

  • “Did that firewall port ever get opened?”
  • “Is my server plugged into the right network?”
  • “What do you mean that service is broken, I can ping it?”
  • “That service isn’t working, I can’t ping it.”
  • “That UDP port isn’t open, I can’t telnet to it!”

    A knowledgeable sysadmin can quickly answer all of these questions for themselves without picking up the phone. And we wouldn’t be in IT if we wanted to talk on the phone.

    The table of contents so far is:

  • Introduction
  • Network layers — the bottom 4 layers, and troubleshooting pointers to later chapters
  • Ethernet
  • IPv4
  • IPv6
  • TCP/IP (protocols, ports, etc)
  • Active traffic (netstat)
  • DNS
  • Checking the Network (sending vs receiving)
  • tcpdump (what we receive)
  • netcat (what we send)
  • packet filtering for sysadmins
  • tracing problems (traceroute & mtr)

    This book also contains guidance on detecting an uneducated network administrator. “Filtering all ICMP, because ICMP is bad? Bzzzt!” I don’t put it in quite those terms, but… yeah. You at least need to know what you’re dealing with.

    Unlike my earlier Mastery books, the incomplete draft of this book will not be available for pre-order. Sales of books that I offer for pre-order are much lower than books I don’t offer pre-order on. Part of this is the topic–DNSSEC has less popular interest than SSH. But the sudo book is doing much less well than I expected, excluding a spike from the Slashdot review. (Reviews on sites like Slashdot help sales more than anything I’ve found.)

    From talking to other indie authors, it seems that an initial surge of sales strongly affects online bookstore’s algorithms. I say seems because most online bookstores do not make their algorithms public–they don’t want clever buggers like you telling me how to game their system.

    The only way for me to tell is to test it, however. I won’t be doing preorders for this book and the next FreeBSD Mastery title.

    I believe that many of my readers don’t need this book. I do hope that you’ll tell certain people you work with to read it, however. You know the ones I mean.

    More updates as events warrant. Or you can check Twitter for the hashtag #n4sa. (I’m not the only one with that hashtag, but it seems pretty rarely used, so I’ll claim it.)

    • Posted on

    Revoked and Replaced OpenPGP Key

    I uploaded a GPG key to subkeys.pgp.net back in 2005. It’s well past time for me to replace it. I covered creating your revocation certificate back in PGP & GPG, but didn’t actually write about using that revocation certificate. Nine years later… yeah, I better figure this out.

    So Io to the machine with my keypair, and create my revocation certificate.

    # gpg --output oldgpg.revoke.asc --gen-revoke E68C49BC

    sec 1024D/E68C49BC 2005-02-21 Michael Warren Lucas Jr (Author, consultant, sysadmin)

    Yep, that’s my old key.

    Create a revocation certificate for this key? (y/N) y
    Please select the reason for the revocation:
    0 = No reason specified
    1 = Key has been compromised
    2 = Key is superseded
    3 = Key is no longer used
    Q = Cancel
    (Probably you want to select 1 here)
    Your decision? 2

    Why is this key being revoked? Because it’s nine years old. I’ve generated a new key,

    Enter an optional description; end it with an empty line:
    >
    Reason for revocation: Key is superseded
    (No description given)
    Is this okay? (y/N) y

    Nobody cares about the details, so I don’t enter any.

    You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
    user: "Michael Warren Lucas Jr (Author, consultant, sysadmin) "
    1024-bit DSA key, ID E68C49BC, created 2005-02-21

    I enter my passphrase.

    ASCII armored output forced.
    Revocation certificate created.

    I now have a revocation certificate, oldgpg.revoke.asc. To activate it, I import it into my keyring.

    # gpg --import oldgpg.revoke.asc
    gpg: key E68C49BC: "Michael Warren Lucas Jr (Author, consultant, sysadmin) " revocation certificate imported
    gpg: Total number processed: 1
    gpg: new key revocations: 1
    gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, classic trust model
    gpg: depth: 0 valid: 2 signed: 14 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 2u
    gpg: depth: 1 valid: 14 signed: 1 trust: 14-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 0u
    gpg: next trustdb check due at 2020-10-13

    No passphrase needed–it just happens.

    Now: sleep tight, sweet prince.

    # gpg --send-keys E68C49BC
    gpg: sending key E68C49BC to hkp server subkeys.pgp.net

    My old key is dead.

    For the record, my new key is 1F2E54A8, for mwlucas at michaelwlucas dot com.

    Now if I could only kill 4EBA9723…

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    “Storage Essentials” first draft complete!

    The first draft of FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is now complete and available on the Tilted Windmill Press site.

    My target for a Mastery book is for it to be about 30K words. That seems a fair length for a $10 technology ebook. FMSE is 45K words, or about 50% more than that. At that price point, it’ll be a bargain. The print version will probably run more than the $20 I prefer, but we’ll see what happens.

    As it’s a complete draft, the price has been raised to $8.99. Once the book goes through technical review and I correct it, the price will go to its final $9.99. At that point, I’ll get it into Amazon, B&N, and so on, in both print and epub.

    So, what’s next?

    Next, I look at my pile of outlines and try to untangle them. I’m planning FreeBSD books on jails, on ZFS, specialty filesystems (which might or might not include network filesystems), and more. These topics are all terribly interrelated. As I’m now writing full time, I need to figure out the approach that makes the best use of my time and yet gives me the maximum amount of exposure to everything.

    I still intend to do a small OpenBSD book in the near future, but I’m still debating what that should be. I have high hopes for both OpenHTTPD and LibreSSL, but I want both projects to settle first. And I have a whole list of non-BSD books on my list as well.

    There’s also the possibility that the market will reject FMSE. If that happens, it will limit how many more FreeBSD Mastery books I do. I think that won’t happen–I expect the book to do well–but I never know. As I’m depending on books to pay my mortgage, I might have to make the hard decision to cancel the series. We’ll have to wait and see.

    Posted on

    I’m changing careers

    My employer was just bought by another company. I find myself unemployed. This was not unexpected, so I’ve had time to think about what to do next.

    I could have another IT job by three PM by picking up the phone and calling my friend Pam. If Pam was out of town, I’d call half a dozen other people and have a job by noon tomorrow. I’d certainly get a raise over what I’m making now–actually, given that I specifically chose a lower-paying job with less stress, I could double my salary. That’s what monster.com tells me.

    But I don’t think I want to do that.

    Instead, after talking with my family and taking a hard look at our finances, I’ve decided to write full time.

    This is a big pay cut for me. Yes, even from my low-stress low-pay job. It means not going out to eat, hoping the car doesn’t drop a transmission, and mowing my own lawn instead of having Chuck the lawn guy do it for me. But it’s work I’ll far enjoy more than being paged at stupid o’clock because some beancounter decided we didn’t need to replace that faulty power supply. I’ll enjoy it a heck of a lot more than attending yet another pointless staff meeting.

    Based on my previous book sales, it appears that I can get my income up to what my recently-departed job paid in about 12-18 months of hard writing. It’ll be a spartan year, but that’s okay.

    Any number of things could derail this plan. I might wind up working at a big company in six months, regretting ever calling anyone a beancounter.

    Writing for a living means I must figure out how quickly I actually write and coming up with a real production schedule. My books have all been written in one-hour stretches, in a variety of inconvenient locations. I have no idea what my sustained output looks like, especially once I no longer have any threat of a phone call waking me up in the middle of the night. (It doesn’t matter how “low-stress” a job is, a faulty email server that taken ten days to get properly fixed means two weeks without writing.)

    Writing for a living means I need to write towards money like a hungry rat gnawing through the brick wall of the butcher shop. My family is supportive, but we do like to go out to eat now and then at a fancy place, like Qdoba. I’m going to try a bunch of different projects and see which take off. I have high hopes for the forthcoming FreeBSD Mastery books, and I have a list of thirty other titles to work on.

    Writing for a living means I need to be a lot more consistent about, say, mentioning that I have a tip jar at the bottom of technical blog posts. I must overcome my shame at saying “Hey, if I helped you, give me money.”

    This means that if you’re one of the organizations that owe me conference reimbursements, I’m gonna knock on your door with my hand out. I have lots of time to do that now.

    This means when my clothes wear out I shop at Salvation Army rather than Costco. That’s okay. Old Sal is more fun, even though you probably don’t want to eat any of the free samples.

    Speaking of Costco? Yeah… try the farmer’s market in downtown Detroit instead. What’s in season is cheap.

    On the other hand, I only have one full-time job now instead of two. I’ll have free time. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve studied the craft of writing for decades now, and given up a lot of things for it. Why, I hear they rebooted Star Trek a few years ago. I grew up watching that show, and I’d really enjoy catching up with it. I can’t see how they’ll have a bald French guy as captain of the Enterprise, but what the heck, I’ll give it a try.

    But am really going to miss the lawn guy.