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I sent the official release announcement today: SNMP Mastery is everywhere. You can get it, no matter where in the world you are or what vendor you prefer. Assuming they’re open, that is.

The world is in chaos. This is the worst possible time to do a book release. Like every other industry in the world, my income has plunged eighty percent. Fortunately, I’ve prepared for just such a contingency. We’ll be okay for a while yet.

But the world has no space for April Fool’s Day.

I’ve long believed that a prank must have meat behind it. A funny blog post is not a prank. Ed Mastery was a prank, particularly with the Manly McManface edition. People saw it, snorted, and then discovered it was real and laughed. And certain people were horribly, horribly offended. Exactly as intended.

SNMP is often compared to black magic. Therefore, I prepared a grimoire version of SNMP Mastery, to be released on April Fool’s Day.

Presenting The Networknomicon, or SNMP Mastery, by Abdul Alhazred, as translated from Alien Syntax Notation.1 by Michael W Lucas.

It is the finest physical artifact I have ever produced. The dust jacket is glorious, and there’s still more glorious art beneath it. The interior is stamped with labels from the Miskatonic University Library of Computer Science. No other technology topic is so utterly fitting to be presented as a eldritch tome of forbidden black magic. I have labored over the Networknomicon for six months.

The world is flat-out not in a place for this prank.

The Networknomicon was a sunk cost when everything went to hell. It was already at the printer. Copies were shipped to all the print-level sponsors and Patronizers. The ball was rolling downhill, and people were looking at the sponsor copies and saying that they needed it.

I’m still proud of creating the Networknomicon.

I would much prefer the world was in a place to laugh with me. But it’s not.

I’ve elected to just let it quietly seep out, not using it as an April Fool’s prank. I’m not going to demand to know who did this, indignantly insist the perpetrators fess up, threaten lawsuits for soiling my good name. I will not demand to know what happened to the “My Little Pony”-themed editions I supposedly shipped to print sponsors and Patronizers. And what sort of idiot prices a book at $66.66? (Yes, it’s expensive. This art was not cheap.)

My excitement has been building for six months. I have been desperate for 1 April to arrive so I could enjoy the world’s perplexity and cackle for a solid week.

And it’s going to fizzle. This disappointing decision makes me sad.

But I can’t joke about necromancy, black magic, and a book bound in cyborg hide during a pandemic, while millions are losing their jobs and companies that charge thousands of dollars for desperately needed ventilator fittings that can be cheaply 3D printed on site are threatening to sue over saving people’s lives.

On the whole, I’m ridiculously lucky. What everyone else calls “social distancing” is my normal life. I bought a Costco crate of toilet paper a week before the panic hit Detroit. I have enough medication to get through a few months, and enough steel cut oatmeal for months.

I will get over the sad. And we will get through this. Most of us, at least.

Today’s the official release date for Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition.

You can get the paperback, ebook, and hardcover anywhere mediocre-or-better books are sold.

And with this, I’m off to vBSDCon.

At fourteen years old, PGP & GPG is perhaps my oldest title still in print. And soon, it will be no more.

The theory in the book is still good, but GnuPG has changed in the last decade and a half. The PGP version discussed in the book is no more. Best practices and use cases have changed. I’d guess half the chapters have some utility, while the other half have none.

So the book is being deliberately eased out of print. It predates Kindle, so there won’t even be an ebook version available.

My No Starch books normally sell out their print run, get reprinted a few times, and fade into Out Of Print status. But PG3 never sold out its initial print run.

I’m glad we did it. No Starch Press is one of the few publishers who would take a chance on such a title back in the heady days of 2005. (The book came out in 2006, but the decision to take that chance was in 2005 or maybe even 2004.) But it was not a commercial success.

If you want to be a completist collector: grab this book while you can. Soon, it will be no more.

I expect the price of used copies to immediately skyrocket, of course. Because that’s what rarity does.

Fire up the sirens and release the hounds, another novel has escaped!

People have begged for a sequel to Butterfly Stomp Waltz for years. (Earthquake Kitten Kiss doesn’t count; it features side character Liza Bradley, and it’s romantic suspense.) I’m delighted to finally be able to say “Here you go. Now hush.”

Terrapin Sky Tango is now available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover, almost everywhere books are sold. It’s 110,000 words of blood and mayhem–perhaps not Robert Jordan hefty, but big for a crime novel.

A FAMILY AFFRAY

Family. It’s worse than murder.

Grab it at Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Gumroad, Amazon US, Amazon AU, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Amazon DE, Amazon FR, Amazon IT, Amazon ES

As part of this release, I looked at cover branding. I outsourced the BSW cover, which complicated long-term maintenance of the book. (The designer did a fine job, mind you; she simply used different tools than I do.) So I redesigned the cover to theme these books, with a theme I can use for all future Beaks novels. As part of this redesign, I was able to cut the print price of BSW down to $11.99USD and release a hardcover for a paltry $24.99.

50% John McClane
50% Robin Hood
100% trouble

Thievery, lies, and betrayals propel Salton across the world, from Atlanta, Georgia, to the heat of Portugal and the jungles of Myanmar, where she must put everything on the line to save everything she loves.

You can get BSW at Kobo, iTunes, Nook, Gumroad, Amazon US, Amazon AU, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Amazon DE, Amazon FR, Amazon IT, Amazon ES, and a bunch of other places.

In other news: Sudo Mastery went to copyedit last night. I really, really hope to have print in hand for vBSDCon.

Now pardon me, I gotta start work on snmp Mastery and another Prohibition Orcs novella.

Penguicon gave me an hour for my author reading.

So I read my column from the March/April 2019 issue of the FreeBSD Journal.

See the video on YouTube.

Many people who have sponsored books asked me to let them know when I have another book sponsorship open. They sincerely want to help me. Between the black pit masquerading as my inbox and my unease with daring to take money for books that I haven’t yet written, however, I can’t actually accomplish that.

I have elected to outsource yet another job that I’m no good at.

In addition to my fiction announcement and nonfiction book announcement lists, I have a sponsorship announcement list.

You’ll only get mail when I open a sponsorship.

(Wow. Three blog posts in two days. Weird.)

Part of having an annual goal is accountability, so: how did January go?

I wrote 27,500 words, or a little over half my goal. Given that I wrote 14,100 words in November 2018, doing my best to write full-out: I’ll take it.

Also, a big chunk of this was redrafting parts of the jails book. I don’t count rewritten words. I only count words that make the manuscript longer. If a book is at, say, 30,000 words, and I discard 5,000 of them and rewrite them in a day, how many words did I write? Well, if the book is 30,000 words at the end of the day, then I wrote… zero words.

Why count this way?

I am not paid to rewrite. I am paid to produce quality books. Left to my own devices, I’ll fiddle with text until it’s absolutely perfect. Long obsolete, but perfect.

But it’s clear that a whole bunch of what I wrote before my thyroid lobectomy was… unacceptable. I have no idea what some of those sentences were supposed to mean. So they had to go. (See the “quality” part of what I’m paid for.)

I could whinge and weasel and say that I actually wrote another 15,000 words this month, but you know what? That’s bogus. I’m a word factory. Factories don’t get paid when quality control throws out two months of product. That’s why I don’t count blog posts. (Which is part of why I don’t blog so much these days. Blogs do not pay the mortgage.)

The good news is, the jails books nears completion. I have to write about RCTL, figure out my last problems with delegating ZFS datasets to a jail, and a couple tidbits about iocage migration. Once I finish the first draft of the book, the print and ebook sponsorships close.

I’m drawing the tech reviewers for this book from the FreeBSD developers. I always give them first dibs, mind you, but the response this time was overwhelming. Seems a whole bunch of developers want this book to exist. Which is really cool! But it does mean that I have all the tech reviewers I can handle right now.

With any luck I’ll have FMJ for BSDCan. Perhaps even Penguicon, if everything goes really well.

As the tech reviewers and copyeditors do their work on FMJ, I’ll finish up Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) and get my lab set up for a second edition of the sudo book. After pounding my head on the bars of the jail for almost a year, I can really use a comparatively easy book.

I’ll leave you with the draft cover for FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. In addition to the nifty back cover quote from PHK, I also asked him to write a foreword. He was gracious enough to indulge me.

Amazon can deliver and NSP has copies, so I think I can say: Absolute FreeBSD is now shipping!

Here’s the Obligatory Gratuitous New Book Selfie.

Grab an ebook/print bundle direct from No Starch Press. NSP coupon code ILUVMICHAEL gives you 30% off any NSP purchase and puts a few extra bucks in my pocket, so that’s cool. And there’s Amazon. There’s always Amazon, the company we all love to loathe.

Or check the book page for links to other stores.

On 24 September 1993, the IETF published RFC 1519, designating Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR) and variable length subnet masks as the standard. That particular document is obsoleted by later RFCs, but it’s still a milestone.

Before then, IP addresses were allocated by “classes.” Class A, B, and C addresses were the norm. I’m not going to explain classful addressing, because it’s long obsolete and, on the current Internet, stupid.

What I am going to do is go on a mini-tirade about classful addressing. Because there’s a lot of people out there still teaching classful addressing to newcomers. And then these poor newcomers hit the field, and people like me have to spend our time unteaching them what they so painfully learned.

I fully understand it takes a few years to disseminate knowledge. But textbooks are still being published that claim classful routing is the standard. This is an appalling disservice to the profession.

Yes, CIDR looks hard. But if a new network admin can’t handle CIDR and VLSM, they shouldn’t be administering networks. That’s perhaps the easiest math they’ll need to handle in their career. And the Internet is full of cheat sheets for people who don’t want to bother to do the math.

On this, the 25th anniversary of Classless Inter-Domain Routing, I hereby declare 24 September 1993 CIDRDay, dedicated to stamping out classful addressing. A whole variety of celebrations are appropriate.

First, of course: cider! Cider is obligatory on CIDRDay.

Second, whenever someone who should know better says “Class C,” “Class B,” or “Class A” address? Explain to them the error of their ways, with the minimum amount of force needed to make sure that they never say it again.

If you know someone who’s still teaching that garbage? Yell at them until they promise to stop. If yelling doesn’t work, escalate.

Because frankly, I’m tired of reeducating innocent newcomers who should have been better served by their instructors.