Category: Nonfiction Books

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

• Sponsoring a Scam
• For 1 April: #mwlSecretBook reveal!
• Ed Mastery follow-up

I hereby declare this prank complete.

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.

I’m about halfway through the new edition of Sudo Mastery. Assuming nothing terrible happens, should have a complete first draft in four to six weeks. Enough stuff has changed in sudo that I need to carefully double-check every single feature. (I’m also horrified by the painfully obsolete versions of sudo shipped in the latest versions of CentOS and Debian, but people running those operating systems are already accustomed to their creaky obsolescence.)

But the reason for this blog post? I have Eddie Sharam’s glorious cover art. My Patronizers saw it last month, so now the rest of you get a turn.

This is weirdly shaped for a book cover, but there’s reasons.

Ebook purchasers will get the three Beasties and a Tux. (Why the unbalanced ratio? Because of the turtleneck.) Print book purchasers will get another Tux and Minix’s Rocky, on a wraparound cover. Hardcover book purchasers will get all that, plus Puffy on the inside flap. Sadly, Dragonfly doesn’t have a cartoon mascot. They’re not left out, though.

No, you would not be the first person to note that I shouldn’t be allowed to come up with my own cover art. And no, I’m not telling you what medications I’m on-that’s both personal and a trade secret.

This fantastic cover is possible mostly because of my sponsors. You still have a little time to become a print sponsor or ebook sponsor. A very little time, but time.

I just got back from mailing the sponsor gifts for FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. Every time I ship sponsor gifts, I tell myself that I really need to intern at a shipping company, because there has got to be an easier way to do this.

The pile on the right goes to international sponsors.

This time I attempted to be modern and use the USPS’ web interface to create customs forms, buy postage, and have them pick this mess up at my door. Unfortunately, the feature to let me buy postage for overseas packages was busted today. I could buy postage for their fancy mail service where you use their boxes, for twice as much. I already spend a third of the print sponsor income on fulfilling sponsorships, and I really don’t want to raise the rates for international sponsors. There’s no point in doing the easy half the order the modern way when I have to lug the difficult half to the post office anyway.

I did successfully use the online form to create customs paperwork for each international shipment, though. So that’s something.

I had several ideas for fancy sponsor gifts, but they all turned out to be prohibitively expensive. It is possible to get customized Beastie metal files, suitable for gnawing through cage bars. It’s expensive. Baking them inside little cakes is also possible, but a) makes the shipping fiendishly annoying, and the joke gets moldy quick. No matter how droll delightful such cakes would have been, though, the cake would have been actively toxic and my ethics got in the way.

So I’m afraid this time my sponsors get a mere hardcover copy of the book.

I’m considering this project closed, barring any shipping problems.

And this is where I should probably plug the sponsorships for Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition. And my new sponsorship announcement mailing list.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make some serious words on Terrapin Sky Tango…