Category: bsd

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next talk: “FreeBSD Filesystem Fun” at March semibug

I’m slated to present at the next SemiBUG meeting.

By unpopular demand, I’ll offer “FreeBSD Filesystem Fun,” also known as “odd stuff I learned as I’ve written the FreeBSD storage books.” You’ll get content on UFS, ZFS, unionfs, various memory filesystems, and some of the really odd corners I discovered while writing the book. Warning: will contain actual math and ZFS tuning know-how.

15 March. 7 PM. Altair Engineering!

To be followed by dining at Leo’s Coney Island right next door. (We’re flexible on dinner, but somehow it always turns out to be Leo’s.)

Future meetings of note include two special guests:

On 19 April, Tom Lawrence is coming to talk about pfSense.

And on 17 May, Isaac Levy is flying in from New York City to talk about FreeBSD jails. I’d really like to fill our space for this one, as Ike is both a great speaker and making a special flight exclusively for us. Knowing Ike, I suspect that the dinner afterwards will involve beer.

June will be a BSDCan trip report, and July, Josh Grosse on porting software to OpenBSD.

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Sponsorships for “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS”

I recently put up a post musing offering sponsorships for tech books. The reaction I got, both in blog comments and private email, was overwhelmingly positive.

And people are eagerly awaiting FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS, by Allan Jude and yours truly.

So, I’ve decided to try selling sponsorships for FM:AZ.

Ebook sponsors ($20) get their name in the ebook. Print sponsors ($100) get their name in both the print and electronic versions. Other books will have other pricing levels.

Some of the emails I got after that first post let me know that some people will happily pay a few dollars to get a link to their dodgy web site in a reputable location. For that reason, I won’t be linking to sponsors in the ebook. (As usual, it’s a handful of jackasses that ruin things for the rest of us.)

You should know that the money from the sponsorships goes entirely to me. Allan both a) has a steady paycheck, and b) is too generous for his own good. (It’s, like, blatantly obvious he’s Canadian.) I intend to buy his beer at BSDCan.

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The Penguicon Lucas Tech Track

I submitted several tech events to Penguicon, our local tech/SF/maker/assorted random WTF convention.

They accepted six: five talks and one panel.

So if you’re in Detroit on the weekend of 29 April-1 May, come by and see me bloviate about:

  • PAM: You’re Doing It Wrong
  • the ZFS File System
  • Networking for Systems Administrators
  • Encrypted Backups with Tarsnap
  • BSD Operating Systems in 2016
  • Senior Sysadmin Panel

    The last one, the Senior Sysadmin Panel, should be a lot of fun. I’m looking for 3-4 more people to sit on that panel. I was a pro sysadmin for 20 years at a variety of organizations. Ideally, while I’m moderating the panel, I’d like to be the junior sysadmin on it. Let me know if you’ll be at Penguicon and interested.

    I’ve also expressed strong interest in being on the self-publishing panel, but I haven’t heard back on that yet. That’ll be on the lit track.

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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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    “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.