Category: Chatter

This post went to Patronizers in July and to the public in August. Not a Patronizer? You could be!

It’s 98F outside and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Settling into the new apartment continues. My master plan for a smaller desk I can wheel onto the balcony is almost complete, but it’s 98F outside. I did go to the dojo yesterday despite the heat, but I think going tonight would be pushing my limits. Fortunately, my physical labor of getting our home ready to sale is done and I don’t have to go out in it. Other people are working on the house, preparing it for sale, and I don’t have to go back until next week. The divorce is in the court’s hands and everyone’s waiting.

Which means I have a week to catch up, starting with getting the monthly See the Sausage Being Made article back on the schedule I prefer. It feels like putting out to sea in a raft designed by observing nature rather than a knowledge of physics.

I’ve been reading the OpenZFS Mastery manuscript, tweaking tidbits here and there in the beginning. I hope to build up momentum so that when I reach the point where I stopped writing, I just keep going. This technique has worked well for me in the past and I’m hopeful it will again. Besides, I have nothing to do but hide indoors and write, because 98F.

No bright idea survives contact with reality, so I’m still rearranging the apartment. I had set up my test server under my desk, as one does, and configured a wireless bridge to give it Ethernet. It worked fine. I want to kill the power to the office when I’m not working, however. I call the test server as such because it hosts the VMs I use for testing, and it has eight hard drive bays for ZFS testing. I have a couple projects that I want to write about next that would benefit from having a production server running 24/7. I’ve relocated the test host to the living room and plugged it directly into the demarc switch. In my copious free time I’ll be configuring a DNS server and a netflow collector on it. That’ll let me play with things like DNS-based ad blocking and IPv6 analysis, two topics that will play against each other. The software license on my streaming media TV permits it to use my bandwidth during off hours to pillage web sites to feed AI scumbags? First, how dare. Second, turn off the TV at the power strip when not in use. But log its DNS queries so you can send those queries to oblivion, and analyze the traffic so you can feed it garbage? That’s the goal. Plus, you know, solving actual sysadmin problems. But mostly grinding my personal axes, the source of my best books.¹

Earlier today, I got a message on the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter. It ended in 2024, but a backer had missed both the original download link and the second download link I posted for folks who missed the first one. Two years. I don’t mind resending a download link, but when does Kickstarter fulfillment stop? I hired a naturally organized and disciplined person to shepherd physical fulfillment, so I’m confident that future books will have less drama. If someone fills out a backer survey two years after the campaign ends, should I interrupt everything to ship them the book? Set aside a day a month to check for stragglers on every campaign I’ve ever run? I’m pondering saying something in the Kickstarter like “Fulfillment stops three months after the first shipment leaves my house.” If someone contacts me I can choose to be accommodating, but it also leaves me an exit if necessary. I generally want to be accommodating. I also need room to say “come on, it’s been four years and the thing you backed for no longer exists. I sent you four requests for your shipping address before giving up. We are done here.” I’d leave ebook download links up for a year, because that’s the easy way to be accommodating.

Speaking of fulfillment: all of the N4SA2e Defenestrated Edition copies are on their way. I appreciate everyone’s patience. If I had known or believed Liz and I were going to divorce I would not have run the Kickstarter. Oops, I need to update the SNMP MIB and the web site for it! Tomorrow, I guess. Maybe I’ll do the MIB tonight, that’s nice easy Perl and doesn’t involve any icky images. Book covers are overrated anyway.

If there’s interest, I’m also thinking of an all-Patronizer video hangout this month. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, but life is no longer overwhelming me. Any interest?

Oh! I have managed some original writing from scratch since moving out. The FreeBSD Journal Letters column on improving software quality came out well enough. The Journal has a new editor and is making some changes, which gives me new opportunities to be cranky. I had some fun with it. I also did an interview for the Escape From 2026 Bundle, where I talked singularities and orcdom. Writing that interview was the first time I’ve felt the words come alive in over a year. Oh crap–I owe Digital Reader backers a copy of Tiny Time Wars! And I must update the web site for it!

These fiction bundles where I say my book goes out of print when the bundle ends? They’re collections. I gathered a few of my alternate history and time travel tales into a file, put a cover on it, and boom–an exclusive! The stories are all available elsewhere, but this particular collection won’t ever be in stores. If I need a collection of time travel stories in stores, I’ll write another time travel story and make a different book.

Publishing is an absolute scam. I have no idea why you support me. But I sincerely appreciate it.

I’ll be in Seattle this next week for writer business, but at 7PM this Thursday, 30 July, I’ll be at Sirena Gelato in Kirkland, Washington.²

Feel free to join me.

It took a few iterations, but I did it.

My main standing desk is 60″ by 30″. It’s built on wheeled wire shelves. I tried using a small standing desk from Amazon, but it lacked the structural integrity to hold the monitors still while I typed.

What I wound up with is another set of wheeled wire shelves, 36″ by 18″. The top is a 2’x3′ sheet of laminated MDF supported by half-inch plywood. I used a hole saw to notch post settings in the bottom of the plywood. The Mac is mounted beneath the shelf, along with a power squid. My landscape-mode monitors are on the other desk. Each desk is independently powered, but they can be connected with one USB, one audio, and two DisplayPort cables.

Without a better workshop, this design is as sturdy as I can get. The monitors still wobbled. Adding the ten-disk tower PC to the bottom shelf as ballast sufficiently steadied it.

I can now roll out onto the balcony, with monitors optimized for making words. Detroit hit 100F yesterday and 97F today, but I’m hoping for good outdoor writing weather by November or so. January at the latest.

My sincere gratitude to the folks who saw my Amazon wishlist and sent me the parts. Yes, the wishlist is empty–because people keep buying whatever I put on it! Your generosity has made rebuilding a life much more comfortable. Thank you.

This post went to Patronizers in June and to the public in July. Not a Patronizer? You could be!

I am now settled in a safe and clean apartment. After ten days of work, everything is unpacked and in a place. I’m not happy with all the places, but those can be adjusted and if things have a place the apartment can be kept tidy. My office is functional, including printers and wireless. I’m actually fairly content with how it came out.

Going from a sprawling house to an apartment is weird. The network demarc is close enough to my office that, instead of trying a dozen different makeshift ways to get Ethernet to my test gear, I might be able to do everything over wireless? The power strips all show these bizarre “grounded” lights, which I have never seen before but am reliably informed do not represent a failure mode.

My first priority is catching up on stuff that’s behind. I had planned to ship Patronizer copies of the Defenestrated N4SA2e, but a problem with my Patronizer system has made me delay a day. I suspect that none of the paused print-level Patronizers chose to pause, but I must verify before turning them on. I’d be inclined to just ship them all books, but someone might have gotten disgusted with me and wish to never hear my name again and I don’t want the postal inspectors to charge me with mail-order stalking.

My second priority is getting back to making words. I’m financially okay for a few months, but people support me when they see progress and there has been no real progress for a few months. I can’t just leap into writing eight hours a day, however. Writing is a muscle that must be warmed up or you crash and burn out. I’m starting by blogging more often. Some of that content will make it into Sausage posts as relevant, but most of it will be randomness to get the writing brain rolling. The impulse to write is once again present, but I know my brain. Brains are the worst. The worst. I can’t afford a self-imposed crash.

Plus: I might be living separately, but the divorce still must work its way through. An estate sale agent is disposing of the material trappings of our old life and then the house will go on the market. This is all intensely emotional, and I just have to roll with it.

I’m making the best of the split, though. My new apartment is less than two miles from my dojo, so I’ve been practicing more. The rats came with me, and they’re settled in okay. Everything is in open storage, which helps me remember what I own. Money is tight so I am living on a cash only basis until I achieve stability.

In other good news/bad news, a couple of publications that I had sold stories to folded. Again. Once again, as previously documented, I have been seen fleeing a burning publisher. The bad news is, the publisher sat on them for two years and I won’t get paid for them. In indifferent news, I am giving up on selling short pieces to publishers. It’s not worth my time. In good news, I can publish these stories myself and score an easy dopamine hit. The pile includes Montague Portal and Rats’ Man’s Lackey, so that’ll make some of you happy. Plus a ghost story, a magic Regency, and a sci-fi Regency. Because I could, because they amused me, and because nobody stopped me.

No, I didn’t warn anyone. They might have stopped me.

That’s kind of the key right now. Not warning people? No–well, okay, yes, also that. But amusing myself. The path to being okay lies through amusement. Besides, if the labor of writing doesn’t amuse me, the result will read like any other tech book. Tedious. Flat. I’m connecting with people and attempting to refill my well of amusement. I’ll be doing a writer’s event in Seattle at the beginning of August, and have tentatively scheduled a public meetup at Sirena Gelato in Kirkland on the evening of July 30th. No, I haven’t scheduled with the gelato shop. That would count as a warning.

Anyway, if you’re around Seattle on 30 July, there’s your chance to meet me.

And now, the Tilted Windmill Press store wants me to update to WordPress version 7.0, complete with generative AI features. Do not try me this month, you abhorrent monster. Do not.

In an effort to make the word machine in my skull fire up, I’m trying to blog more. Some of those blog posts will be short and/or daft. Besides, why give my silly thoughts to the big companies and not put them here?

Last night, ZZ Claybourne and I got Chinese and finished watching Alienoid. (Alienoid is a Korean two-part sci-fi kung fu what-the-heck film, reminiscent on Buckaroo Banzai on acid. Both parts are out, so I can recommend it.) Anyway, Chinese food.

We all know fortune cookies. Just like most of our Chinese food, they were invented in the US and play to Western ideas of China.

ZZ and I both picked a cookie from the bag. His was, as is traditional, trite and inoffensive. Mine?

This is my new favorite fortune. The world needs more fortunes like this.

Also, M is my lucky lottery number? I do believe I’ve been told that if I want to win the lottery, I must resort to methods other than the traditional “buy a ticket and hope.” Fair enough.

Just because things connect doesn’t mean they work.

The small standing desk supports the two monitors and the CPU. Unplug four cables, and I can move it anywhere in the apartment.

But if I actually start writing on the attached keyboard, the whole thing shakes horribly. The little standing desk isn’t robust enough to support all that equipment.

Having the extra desk space is great, though, and I ache for some mobility. The obvious solution is to build a sturdier standing desk. A smaller set of the wire shelves I use for the main desk and a solid desktop would be far more stable. Unfortunately, my life is chaos right now and my Patronizer system hung up for a couple months exactly when I couldn’t pay attention to it. I am not spending money if I can avoid it.

Folks have asked how they can help me, and I always say “buy my books.” Given my situation, I’ve (ugh) reactivated my Amazon wishlist. There’s not a huge amount on it, but if you feel like giving me a hand I sure won’t say no.

I’m moving to an apartment this week. If you’re waiting for a reply from me, I’ll be back in business next week. But moving is a chance to revisit old setups. A while back, ZZ Claybourne saw my desk and declared it to be “some real Geordi La Forge shit.”

That’s pretty nice, but it got me thinking: what does Geordi have that I don’t?

Forget the advanced tech: that’s just window dressing.

Being far cooler than me? That’s inherent. I can’t help being a total dweeb.

What does he have that I can possibly achieve? The Enterprise-D’s command section is detachable. I’m pretty sure that the TNG premiere only did that because Roddenberry wanted it in the original series and he needed to say “See! We have the budget now!” Also the models, but I digress. Half the saucer separation screen time appeared in the premier, but I digress again. Anyway.

My desk clearly needs the ability to separate the primary and secondary hull. I had all the pieces, including a smaller standing desk that I used for recording and accounting.

It’s not wired up yet, and pieces are missing, but it’s a solid proof of concept.

The smaller desk? That’s where I’ll do writing, on the portrait-mode monitors. I’ll do page layout, spreadsheets, and other landscape-mode tasks at the larger desk.

On nice days when I’d really rather work outside, I can detach one USB cable and two video cables, separate the smaller from the larger, and roll the writing desk out onto the apartment balcony.

So there. Detachable primary hull.

Your move, Geordi.

After 34 years together, Liz and I are getting divorced. This is an amicable split, everyone behaved completely honorably, and we remain friends. We are working together to make sure we both have a solid start in the next phase of our lives.

All new projects are delayed. While I appreciate invitations, I will not be attending events until the process is complete.

The next few months will be very stressful for us both. I ask for your patience and understanding.

Thank you.

This See the Sausage Being Made post goes to Patronizers in February and becomes public in March. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File, freshly updated for the new edition of Networking for System Administrators.

Yes, I just published a StSbM post last week, but I need to get back on track and I have news.

Most importantly, I’m making some words. The writing in the original ZFS books isn’t bad, but it could be better, so generally applicable ZFS discussion is getting redrafted. The FreeNAS miniXL makes a fine test server, and I’m even discovering FreeBSD bugs through bhyve. (The docs say you can install FreeBSD 15 with 256 MBRAM, but for a ZFS install you need at least 350MB to install from packages on ISO. I’d call this a doc bug rather than an OS bug, because if you’re running ZFS on a host with less than 350MB RAM you’re daft, but reducing pkg(8) memory usage is worthwhile.) I’m fixing some of the inconsistencies and standardizing language for certain concepts and tools, which I really should have done the first time around but nobody noticed so I guess we got away with it and that’s all that matters.

The challenge for this book? Linux. ZFS considers Linux a Tier 1 platform, but Linux does not consider ZFS a Tier 1 filesystem. ZFS works. You can install it. But there’s no standard way to use ZFS as a root filesystem on Linux. Many people maintain constantly evolving hacks to support ZFS on root. Some variants added support to the installer only to remove it. Proxmox uses ZFS as its primary filesystem, but very few people run Proxmox on their laptop. I think the majority of the book must assume that Linux users have their root on extFS and data disks with ZFS. It seems that ZFSBootMenu is the current leading Linux ZFS boot manager, so I’ll probably do a final chapter discussing that. Such chapters are the shortest-lived part of any book. Putting it at the end makes it easy to ignore when it becomes obsolete.

Which brings me to the big reason for posting this now: Eddie Sharam sent me the cover art. Behold, an ancient Mediterranean vase.

This is an actual painting, available for sale once the book is released, probably as part of the Kickstarter. I pay Eddie reasonably for his work, but making a living as a visual artist is even more fraught than making a living as a writer. If he can get a few bucks more, I’m all for it. Central front and back images mean that we’ll have to do some digital manipulation to make the spine work on the hardcover, but Eddie’s down with that. (No, I don’t digitally alter images. That would require visual skills I have no desire to develop.)

Last month’s cleaning efforts highlighted a problem that’s a decade in the making: my surplus copies warehouse.

The printer screwed up on the N4SA2e special editions, shipping me 32 regular hardcovers with the special dust jackets. I couldn’t use those for Patronizers, sponsors, or Kickstarters. They did, however, overwhelm my ability to ignore these shelves and force me to face reality. I need to do something with these.

The good news is, crowdfunding forced me to solve the problems of shipping.

I’m going to add them to the TWP bookstore, signed, at list price.

Parts of it will be clunky, because WooCommerce shipping is arcane and inflexible. I hired expert help to solve this problem. They failed, so I’m not investing more effort therein. All shipping will happen on Mondays, unless I fry my brain and can only perform a mechanical task. But between good shipping envelopes, a label printer, and my newfound skill in tape gun reloading, it’s manageable.

I have a handful of tech books, a whole bunch of Prohibition Orcs, and a scattering of novels. The troublesome one will be the chapbooks. I might do a “random chapbook, $5” add-on item. Short story roulette, anyone?

Patronizers, you get dibs. If there’s something you want, drop me a note.

Somewhere in here, I have to set up the 1 April Kickstarter. Yes, I’m doing another one. I promise it’ll be stupid. You might laugh. A handful of you will leap at it, probably as a gag gift. But it’ll amuse me as I’m scrabbling through the ZFS book.

I’m also looking at the production tools for the tech book after OpenZFS. The first edition of SSH Mastery was originally laid out in LaTeX. The PDF looked great. I sent it to the print-on-demand networks. Some indie printer, somewhere in the world, choked on its lack of Adobe-specific and Microsoft-specific gunk. The book was pulled from distribution globally because one location had trouble. I had to hire someone to redesign it in Adobe InDesign, and quickly. Afterwards, I had to dive into the InDesign gutter myself.

That was sixteen years ago.

Are those printers still running in Farawayistan? Perhaps.

But other people are reporting good results replacing both Adobe and Microsoft Office with LibreOffice in producing complicated books. I’m seriously considering trying it for the next tech book. This has risks. If one printer in Farawayistan can’t print the book, distributors will yank the book from distribution globally. I’ll have to redo the book in InDesign, and perhaps even in Office. Sponsors and Kickstarter backers have changed buying patterns, though. I need to produce books for signing in the US, and books for dropship in the US, UK, and Australia. My printer (today) is Ingram. Ingram maintains its printers in those locations quite well. I expect to print those easily.

Worst case: I release book for wide distribution, some printer can’t handle it. I redo it in LibreOffice/InDesign. If that fails, I convert everything to Office and InDesign and start over. My hardcore readers will get the book on time. The rest of the world waits an extra month for print.

The worrisome thing is opening old InDesign files, but I have a license for the Affinity suite. Not the new subscription model, not the newer freeware trap, an actual “you bought this software and can use it forever” license.

Truly, I’d love to be rid of Adobe. And Microsoft. And Adobe. Adobe.

I better sign off before I choke on my own rage. Thank you all for your support, it means the world to me–especially in these times.

This See the Sausage Being Made post goes to Patronizers in January and becomes public in February. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File, freshly updated for the new edition of Networking for System Administrators.

I have one “job.” Yes, I write books. I get paid for that. But the thing I get a “paycheck” for is writing one blog post a month, at the beginning of the month. For Patronizers.

Here we are at January 28, and I am just getting to writing that blog post.

Absolutely zero excuses, only a procedural failure.

I like to write the blog post when something happens. What happened in the last six weeks?

Nothing.

Well, there’s The Longest Dark, the orcish solstice holiday. I took time off for that. Come January, I started to get to work and realized that my test lab was, at best, suboptimal. Many of the topics I write about can be tested and deployed on virtual machines, but I like to do filesystem books on real hardware or at least real disks. I have a host for that–it’s old, but who cares? Disks are disks, and this thing has eight SATA drives and a couple SATADOMs for the OS. Eight drives lets me test most common ZFS configurations. The host is large and noisy, but I have a basement and it has a BMC so I can kick it as needed. Creating a hard drive failure means two flights of stairs and opening a case, but I can live with that.

Mind you, I had stolen some of the hard drives for other purposes. More drives were needed. I descended into the Parts Closet. Well, I call it the Parts Closet. Other people call it a trash heap, or perhaps a Do-It-Yourself Toxic Gas Cloud Kit, Add Your Own Fire. Old computers, old printers, all precariously balanced. Laptops preinstalled with Windows XP with wobbly lids, cat5 wire crimping kits, pristine Unicomp Model M keyboards with button mice, Keyboardio Model 100s with Dvorak keycaps, a wall of small storage boxes with labels like SOEKRIS and PCCARD and SCSI TERMINATORS. The POWER OVER ETHERNET box sits right next to ETHERNET OVER POWER, which I do recommend as a convenient trick if the electrical system in your home doesn’t date from 1949 and wasn’t engineered by a PTSD-stricken pipefitter with delusions of grounding. (Fortunately cable TV is historical, so I can run Ethernet over the old coax someone paid big money to install.) Once I started digging for hard drives and discovered several expensive 250GB IDE disks, the necessity of a purge overcame my unwillingness to perform said purge.

Finding the cable crimpers reminded me that I needed to check some of the long-haul cabling in the house. The cable tester showed that I shouldn’t ask questions I don’t want answered.

Now let’s detour into backups.

I have a iX Systems miniXL running FreeNAS for local backups, and rely on Dropbox and Tarsnap for external backups. All the backups get tested monthly, mainly because I routinely screw up and must recover from backup. The miniXL also serves as my MP3 storage, because cleaning out the parts closet demands a soundtrack.

Naturally, I’m halfway through the ghastly purge when the music dies.

The miniXL’s boot SATADOM was no longer a boot device in the BIOS.

Fine. I’ve never worked with SATADOM hardware before, but how bad could it be? I ordered an inexpensive replacement.

The Supermicro power cable didn’t fit. Apparently that’s a well-known example of vendor lock-in, so I ordered a more expensive guaranteed compatible Supermicro SATADOM that was not at all compatible and immediately went back to the dealer. Fortunately, some ex-iX folks mentioned that the miniXL had space for an SSD. I had found a couple SSDs in the Parts Closet.

But then I realized that the miniXL has eight removable hard drive bays, is much quieter than my test system, and would easily fit under my standing desk (pic). Causing a hard drive failure with this host doesn’t require going to the basement and opening a case.

The critical service, music, is now being shared from my Mac desktop.

Backups? I have external USB cases for local hosts to back up to. I used the FreeNAS box because it was there. The miniXL is now running raw FreeBSD 15 and bhyve.

I now have a less unsuitable test environment and the toxic waste accident has been relocated from my home to the recycling center. Well, technically, I’ve converted one large toxic waste accident into two smaller accidents and added one of those accidents to a full scale disaster, but I’m not responsible for that disaster so I’m going to be a good citizen and ignore it.

In other news: last month I said I had completed fulfillment of the new Networking for System Administrators by packing and shipping a few hundred books. Uh… not so much. Yes, I finished packing the books. The US Postal Service hauled them off my porch. All good?

No.

More than one backer contacted me to say that their books were weirdly delayed. The USPS hauled my overseas books from Detroit to the big processing center Chicago, where most of them sat for a month. A handful ricocheted between Chicago and NYC for weeks. Several folks told me that this is unacceptable. I agree. I have no leverage nor any ability to fix this, however. My country is increasingly hostile to small business. I’m pretty sure that if I used USPS’ expensive two-day shipping, they would arrive speedily. I could use UPS or Fedex, except they’re expensive and might charge $50 to collect $3 in VAT depending on criteria so complicated as to be effectively unpredictable.

There’s also been other surprises. US Export Compliance returned one package because they require a full recipient name. A recipient like “A D Smith” is not acceptable; the shipping label must spell out Anonymous Doof. I’d expect the destination address to establish an internal protocol for demultiplexing initials, but apparently my government needs to know exactly who backs me. This has never been a problem before, but fine, rules change and there’s probably an announcement somewhere.

All I can think of to do is: warnings on my crowdfunding campaigns. Lots of warnings.

Much like I do when I warn you Patronizers that backing me is a terrible deal. January had no progress, but many tiny fixes. Yes, yes, that’s its own kind of progress but it doesn’t get words on the page. I do appreciate y’all. Thank you.