Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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“TLS Mastery” sponsorships open

My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.

This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.

You can sponsor in print or ebook. Remember, the print sponsorship includes everything in the ebook sponsorship, so you don’t need to buy both unless you want your name to appear twice in the ebook.

As we’re in a pandemic: take care of you and yours first! I’m conflicted on offering sponsorships, as so many people have lost their jobs. Several folks said they were going to send me money anyway, so I’ve opened these up. Do NOT send me money if you have any doubts about your financial stability.

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“SNMP Mastery” leaking out

Bit by bit, site by site, SNMP Mastery is escaping into the world. I’ll keep the SNMP Mastery entry on my web page updated as it appears in more stores.

The various store databases are still synching everything up. You can get both paperback and Kindle on Amazon, but the entries aren’t connected. IngramSpark, the non-Amazon paper distributor and the sole source for hardcovers, is still processing. It’ll appear in other stores soon.

Now to go do my taxes, and get more work on git sync murder.

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The MWL 2020 Asia Tour

Yep, I’m a big star now, touring Asia and everything! Sort of. Two countries. Two cities. The world’s most minimal tour. I’m a big star, in a really really tiny universe.

19-22 March 2020, I’ll be at AsiaBSDCon. I’m presenting a four hour tutorial on FreeBSD jails, as well as attending the conference.

The fine folks at HasGeek are sponsoring me on an accompanying trip to Bangalore, India, for three events. (Cool fact of the day: they’re not conferences in India, they’re events, because a “conference” apparently involves the Indian government and this isn’t a government thing.)

25 March, I’m offering a public lecture on Where is the Sysadmin Today at Juspay’s offices. I have rants thoughts. Oh, do I have rants thoughts.

27 March, I’m attending Netconf. This is an Unconference (Unevent?), so the program won’t be set until it starts. I’ll be proposing my new SNMP talk. I could also give any talk I’ve given before. If you’re attending and want me to give a specific talk, please comment or use the contact form to ask me to submit it.

28 March, I’m doing a reading of git commit murder at Champaca Bookstore, as well as a Q&A with Swapneel Patneka and anyone else who opens their mouth.

Why do this trip, when I loathe travel? Over the last twenty years, I’ve promised several folks that I would one day attend AsiaBSDCon. I keep my promises. I’m looking forward to being there, but not to getting there. The Bangalore trip is serendipitous. Presenting technology is how I built my career. Bangalore is a technology center and obviously a place I should present in. HasGeek asked if I would be interested, I said “if you could put an event by AsiaBSDCon,” and those folks actually went and did it. I’m simultaneously amazed and honored that they’ve gone to such trouble.

Plus, HasGeek opened discussions by promising gelato. They did their research.

I’ll have a couple free days in each place, yes, and I’ll take advantage of them. I’d rather like to attend a few classes at the Hombu Dojo, but… Fly across the world, teach crowds of strangers to whom English is a second language, talk to folks about areas I’m an expert in? Sure. Set foot on Ueshiba’s tatami? I’ve only practiced martial arts for eighteen years, there’s absolutely no way I’m worthy.

And India’s history is thousands of years deep, plus there’s elephants and tigers and… and… everything. I can’t decide what to see.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m cutting down my traveling. This trip will cost me at least a week of writing time before the trip, and probably two weeks of writing time afterwards as I recover. It’s at least a month of proper writing, all told, and probably more. I can’t authoritatively say that this is my final trip to Asia, no matter what. I can say that I’m not planning to travel so far again. If you’re on that side of the world and want to meet me, this is your best opportunity.

I will do Penguicon and BSDCan in 2020, but otherwise, I’ll be home making words.

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“SNMP Mastery” cover reveal

I’ve been working like a maniac to complete “SNMP Mastery” before AsiaBSDCon. This means I haven’t had time to do my usual year-end roundup, the book cover reveal, or any of my usual beginning-of-year crud. The book went to copyedit today. At 60,000 words, it’s the biggest Mastery title yet. It’s bigger than I wanted, but SNMP is bigger than I want it to be, so I guess it evens out.

This means I have time to show the cover, done after Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day.

SNMP Mastery wraparound cover

Why’s Beastie the one holding the umbrella? Because he’s a bloody gentleman. Also: hands.

(Purists will note that the ISBN sticker is not right. That’s because it’s not the final ISBN. I just assigned ISBNs today. I won’t have the real barcode until close to completion. You don’t have to email me about the inaccuracy, I remember from last time. Seriously.)

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“SNMP Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

I’ve just finished the first draft of SNMP Mastery, and I’m looking for folks interested in pointing out my mistakes and misunderstandings.

If you’ve got the time to read the book and comment, please drop me an email at mwl at mwl dot io saying:

  • your degree of SNMP expertise
  • that you won’t share the draft manuscript. (I don’t need piracy of unproofed manuscripts to ruin my reputation, the finished books do enough harm, thank you.)

I would need all comments back before Monday, 13 January 2020. All comments need to be in plain text with enough context that I can find the bit you’re talking about, or annotations on the PDF. While I appreciate the madman who took the time send me PostScript diffs, I am insufficiently geeky to cope with them in the time allotted. With luck I’ll have it in time for AsiaBSDCon and HasGeek in March.

This book is written with a Lovecraftian cosmic horror motif. Because

We’re left with a protocol that’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but bears all the scars of its history. SNMP lets you invoke ancient standards from the void. It grants you incredible system-changing power, and can destroy everything you’ve worked for. SNMP exposes the secrets of your servers, and—if you’re thoughtless—reconfigures them into unspeakable nightmares. It’s like something out of an HP Lovecraft tale, without the rampant xenophobia but with all the alien system topologies.1

1The topologies were there all along. Your shallow human mind was blissfully incapable of perceiving them.
This whole analogy is disturbingly apropos.

Here’s the Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • SNMP Essentials
  • Authentication
  • Queries
  • The Management Information Base
  • The Net-SNMP Agent
  • Logging
  • SET
  • Proxies, SMUX, and AgentX
  • Access Control
  • Extending snmpd(8)
  • Monitoring
  • Traps
  • Afterword

What comes next? I’ve been writing twelve hours a day for the past two weeks to finish this book on time. What comes next is a heartfelt faceplant. Hopefully onto the couch, but if I hit the bed of nails that’s okay.

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The Six Prequels to “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails”

I’ve said a few times that I needed to write six books before I could write FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. Some were for the reader, because I didn’t want to take a break from the jails content to explain a seemingly unrelated topic. Some were for me, because I didn’t know everything I needed about a topic to effectively cover jails.

I thought which six books those were was obvious. I have heard from more than one person that it’s not. I chose to not put a title-by-title course of study in the front of the jails book. Seems I was wrong about that as well.

So: without further ado, here are the six prequels to FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.

  • Networking for Systems Administrators

    People want to bridge their jails, or VNET them, or NAT them, or otherwise play tricks with their network. You can’t set up a virtual switch if you don’t understand what a switch is. You can’t network your jails if you don’t understand netmasks. Every time your first virtual network grows, you have to troubleshoot everything.

  • FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials

    Jails are all about storage. You can implement one or two jails without knowing what you’re doing, but eventually they’ll ruin your day.

  • FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS
    FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS

    ZFS is incredibly jail-friendly. It doesn’t suit all deployments, but if you want to implement jails at scale you’re almost certainly exploiting ZFS.

  • FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems

    Any non-trivial jail implementation requires understanding devfs, nullfs, and memory filesystems. Many use iSCSI, NFS, and/or autofs. By the time I put all that in a book, I might as well add in namespace filesystems and HAST and completely cover special-purpose filesystems.

  • Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition

    By the time I wrote all of the above, FreeBSD had changed enough that the second edition wouldn’t suffice.

Yes, I planned this. Every book I write is ordered internally in much the same way. I look at the material for each chapter and say “What must the reader understand before reading this?” I often revisit my chapters as needed, or even split them. Chapters 17 and 19 of AF3e were originally part of early chapters, but I had to split those chapters and put parts of them later because the reader would lack the context to understand the material.

Mind you, this is only what you need to get jails working. Managing jails is the pinnacle of systems administration practice, so I’d certainly recommend you learn about SSH, PAM, and sudo. Really, though, I’d suggest get a job at the gelato shop. You’ll be happier.

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“SNMP Mastery” sponsorships now live

My next tech book will be SNMP Mastery. Much like PAM Mastery, I’m writing this book as a public service. SNMP is an uncomfortable fact of life. It’s baroque, obtuse, and misunderstood.

Now that I’ve shipped the Sudo Mastery sponsor gifts, I’m opening print and ebook sponsorships for SNMP Mastery.

The voices in my head tell me that I need to write this with Lovecraftian cosmic horror references. Because SNMP. Who knows if that’ll actually work in the manuscript, however.

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Manly McManface: Endgame

I’ve sold 71 copies of Ed Mastery: Manly McManface edition. This means I owe the Grosse Pointe Soroptimists $71. Most of these were print sales, presumably as prank gifts because of the very manly cover.

Rather than track sales of this book forever, I’ve rounded up the amount I donated to $250. I expect this will cover the lifetime sales of this particular edition. Tilted Windmill Press is now a proud sponsor of SIGP’s Stop Traffic 5K Walk/Run on 21 September.

They have room for more sponsors. You should consider sponsoring this fundraiser for a very worthy cause.

If you’re local, you should consider stirring your lazy carcass and joining the walk.

And for posterity, here’s the complete official chronology of this most masculine of books.

I hereby declare this prank complete.

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“Sudo Mastery” and the new Tilted Windmill Press clothing line

Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition, is now complete. I’m doing the release slightly different this time, however.

Unsubstantiated pervasive rumors have it that books sell better if they’re available in all formats. The ebook is always faster to arrive than the print, because electrons are instantaneous. I’ve put the ebook on preorder until 3 September, about two weeks from today. This should give the paperback and hardcover time to propagate through all the bookstores. I’m dubious this will have any effect on sales, but you never know.

Also: for years now, people have asked me to put some of the tech book covers on T-shirts. I’ve finally done as requested. I originally wanted to run this directly through tiltedwindmillpress.com, but while the tech would be fun the tax implications would be unfun. So I fell back on Teespring, and set up a store.


There’s shirts for jails, sudo, and a couple other books. Including the book everyone would ask me about, specifically so people don’t ask about it (but it’s extra expensive, because reasons). So: those of you who asked for shirts? Here you go.

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“Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition” open for tech review

I finished the first draft of the new Sudo Mastery last night, and spent today polishing it up for tech review. If you want to do a tech review, this is your chance. Send an email to mwlucas at michael w lucas dotcom, telling me that you want to review and you won’t make the manuscript public.

I need all reviews back by 5 August. This gives me time (if everything goes well) to have the book in print for vBSDCon. Assuming they accept my proposal, that is.

As a side effect of this, I’ll be closing both the print sponsorships and ebook sponsorships in the next 24 hours.

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting about gelato.