It’s been leaking out for a while, but now that you can get print and ebook, I guess I can say:
FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS is out!
The “advanced” is an important word. This is the toughest, most complicated book I’ve ever written.
Penguicon 2016 Lucas Track Schedule
While the folks at Penguicon reserve the right to change the schedule at any time, we’re close enough to the con that I’m comfortable releasing my talks and panel schedule. This is extracted from the official Penguicon descriptions. and schedule.
Friday, 30 29 April:
6 PM – Social Media for Writers (panelist) – Hamlin
What social media trends does a writer building their web footprint need to understand? What are some Dos and Don’ts?
8 PM – PAM: You’re Doing It Wrong (speaker) – Windover
PAM, or Pluggable Authentication Modules, is one of the most occult parts of managing Unixish systems. The unique configuration syntax and idiosyncratic rule processing drives many sysadmins to copy working configurations from other people and random blog posts. This talk takes you through the essentials of PAM configuration, You’ll learn the components of PAM, how PAM processes rules, how to use multi-factor authentication, and get an overview of some useful PAM modules you probably haven’t used, based on my forthcoming book “PAM Mastery.”
10 PM – the ZFS File System (speaker) – Windover
ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, is one of the most full-featured filesystems available today and gives almost unlimited storage flexibility. Originally created by Sun Microsystems, the independent entity OpenZFS now develops ZFS as deployed in illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD. This talk takes you through ZFS’ features, including: data self-healing, deduplication and compression, clones and snapshots, copy-on-write, boot environments, replication, and more. Once you use ZFS, you’ll never understand how you lived without it.
Saturday, 1 May 31 April:
11 AM – Networking for Systems Administrators (speaker) – Windover
Too many organizations have a tense relationship between the network folks and the sysadmins. Sometimes it degenerates just short of war. But basic networking isn’t hard–if it was, network engineers couldn’t do it. This talk teaches the essentials, in a way that lets sysadmins troubleshoot network problems on their own. Sysadmins have amazing visibility into the network, once they know how to use it. We’ll cover cross-platform tools for viewing and troubleshooting the network, on both Windows and Unix.
4 PM – Encrypted Backups with Tarsnap (speaker) – Windover
Online backup is incredibly useful, but has many privacy and integrity risks. Tarsnap is an online backup service that only handles your data in encrypted form. It’s inexpensive and reliable. Plus you don’t need to trust the Tarsnap service–they can’t access your backups even if they want to. And Tarsnap’s built-in deduplication saves space, letting you store terabytes of backups in mere gigabytes of disk. This talk takes you through using Tarsnap, from backing up a system to customizing and rotating backups, to fully restoring them.
5 PM – Acts of Shameless Self-Promotion (panelist) – Portage Auditorium
What’s the best way to get your name forward?
7 PM – reading (speaker) – Writer’s Block (313 & 315)
My first ever fiction reading: my datacenter crime story “Wifi and Romex” I’m sharing this hour with Ken MacGregor. Don’t know which half I’ll get.
Sunday, 2 1 May:
10 AM: Self-Publishing 2016 (panelist) – EMC 1
This panel discusses today’s self-publishing options and business models. Our panelists include authors who are both self- and traditionally published, in fiction and nonfiction, including people who are making an income entirely by self-publishing. We’ll discuss why we made the choice to self-publish, the pitfalls and lessons learned, and which business choices we’ve made on our respective self-publishing efforts.
12 PM: BSD Operating Systems in 2016 (speaker) – Windover Charlevoix B
The BSD family of Unix has a been kicking around for almost 40 years now, and have taken different paths than Linux. Come see the last year’s developments in BSD land! One of them just might solve your intractable problem. We’ll talk about new things from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, plus updates from NetBSD, Dragonfly, and assorted derivatives.
2 PM: Senior Sysadmins Panel – Windover
Some say systems administration is a young man’s game, and that eventually sysadmins rise into management. They’re wrong. A sysadmin who measures their experience in decades has made mistakes younger sysadmins can’t even imagine. This panel lets you learn from their suffering, take advantage of their experience, and laugh at their pain.
I’ll have print books at all of my tech talks, including the brand-new FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. You’ll be able to find my novels up in the Writer’s Block, rooms 313 & 315.
I’ll be kicking around the con the rest of the weekend, except for probably a lunch break Saturday. (Anyone interested in pho?) I’m not making a firm schedule for the rest of the time, but you’ll have a pretty decent chance at finding me at any of these events.
Friday 4 PM: LN2 Welcome Back Ice Cream
Friday 11 PM: LN2 After Hours Ice Cream
Saturday 3 PM: LN2 Guest Flavors Ice Cream
Saturday 11 PM: LN2 After Hours Ice Cream
Sunday 11 AM: LN2 Sunday Brunch Ice Cream
“FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” sponsor check
(I wrote sponsors an email with this information earlier, but email is not exactly reliable, so I’m posting it here as well.)
The good news: the book is almost here!
I’m greatly touched by how many people offered their support. The least I can do is verify that I’m spelling your name correctly.
Here’s the sponsor list, as well as my notes on any instructions you sent with your sponsorship. Please double-check that I:
- used the desired name
- spelled your name correctly (especially any non-US characters!)
I would appreciate a response, even if it’s “everything looks OK.”
If you have any additional requests, such as signing the book to someone other than yourself, this is the time to tell me.
The final ebooks should be in your account next week. Print books should ship the last week of the month, if everything goes well.
Thanks again, for everything.
Book Bundles
It’s been a really busy month. FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems came out, as did my BSDNow interview about it. About a month ago I released my new crime novel, Butterfly Waltz Stomp. And the new Immortal Clay novel, Kipuka Blues, officially landed yesterday. I’d planned to blog about the novel release, but Wayne County decided that they needed me to spend the day in the Juror Lounge, waiting for my name to be called so an attorney could look at me and say “Oh, hell no, get out of here.”
But I’m not going to write about any of that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about bundling. Specifically, book bundling.
A book bundle is where a bunch of authors to combine one of their books in a single package. The books share a theme, and the authors are similar enough that each reader’s fans will probably enjoy the others work.
And bundles are cheap. You can get, say, five books for $5, and twelve books for $12.
Anyone can do a bundle, but you really can judge a bundle by the quality of its authors. A bundle starring Yawny McBlech and Tedium Snores isn’t exactly impressive.
Being in a bundle with authors like, say, Michael Stackpole means your work has a certain level of quality. I mean, Stackpole wrote the book that will become the first standalone Star Wars film. That would be cool. I mean, they don’t let just any yahoo write Star Wars. You have to be a very special yahoo.
Or Kris Rusch, who’s written a slew of excellent, enjoyable, and award-winning novels. Plus, she’s won separate Hugo awards for both her fiction and her editing. If you get to hang out with her, you’re in good shape.
Chilling with Dean Wesley Smith, who’s been on the USA Today best-seller list so often that he’s lost count, is probably a good sign.
You don’t have to hang with award winners to be okay, though. There’s people like Anthea Sharp and Mindy Klasky, who aren’t as well-known as Stackpole or Rusch or Smith, but have made their own marks on the best-seller lists.
And authors like Leah Cutter and Blaze Ward and Sherry D Ramsey and Daniel Keys Moran have been around long enough to build a trajectory. That trajectory: is up.
These are the people you want to be bundled with.
And… apparently… me.
In the Middlings Sampler, I got invited to hang out with the cool kids.
The Middlings Bundle is stuff that isn’t quite one thing or the other. The tales are too long to be short stories, but too short to be novels. They’re maybe SF, or fantasy, or some weird thing in between.
And they’re all set in between things. Heaven and Hell. Earth and Fairyland. Planets and stars. Or, in my case, neutronium and nonexistence.
This is a “pay what you think it’s worth” bundle. For a paltry $5, you get:
- How to Babysit a Changeling by Anthea Sharp
- Forever Falls by Michael Warren Lucas (me! me! me!)
- As Needed by Michael A. Stackpole
- Heaven Painted as a Cop Car by Dean Wesley Smith
- Siren by Blaze Ward
For a mere $12 you’ll get:
- Fly Me to the Moon by Mindy Klasky
- Walking Gods by Leah Cutter
- The Possession of Paavo Deshin by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
- Waiting to Fly by Sherry D. Ramsey
- Old Man by Daniel Keys Moran
- A coupon for two free books from Kobo: Collateral Damage by Mark Leslie, and A Bird in the Hand by Douglas Smith
Go check out the Middlings Sampler.
Some questions and answers on the bundle.
Q: How did you get to be part of this?
A: Either I plied Cutter with strong liquor until she succumbed to my pleas for inclusion, or she suffered an astonishing lapse of judgment and invited me. Your choice.
Q: Why push this, instead of your brand-new novel?
A: I’m going to push the novel. Soon. But the Middlings Sampler has an expiration date. Get it by the 25th of April… or NEVER.
Q: Twelve books for $12 doesn’t sound like much. Gimme something else.
A: All right, fine. Ten percent of the proceeds go to support the Washington Talking Books and Braille Library. You need to select that option at checkout, though.
Q: Really, why should I take a look?
A: Because if you don’t at least peek at the Middlings Sampler, the cool kids won’t want to hang out with me any more. And I’ll get really depressed and isolative. More depressed and isolative, I mean. Yes, there’s room for me to be more of both. Really.
Q: If I pay what I think it’s worth, I have to pay more than $12. Can I do that?
A: Yep. There is no upper limit on how much money you can give us.
Q: The Middlings Sampler launched the same day as Kipuka Blues. How did you cope with a bundle coming out on new novel day?
A: I went to jury duty. Where I was not allowed electronics, or anything battery-powered, or dental floss. The fact that they did not have to clean my brain off the ceiling was a miracle.
Q: Seriously, though: what about the new novel?
A: Kipuka Blues. The sequel to Immortal Clay. It’s a play off of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing, set after we lose. We are the pod people. I’ll post more about KBlater, once there’s a review somewhere or there’s a hint that someone actually read the dang thing.
So, in the Middlings Sampler. I’m hanging out with people who write Star Wars! That is totally cool, although I do have to say, Star Trek is better. No, wait–Smith and Rusch both wrote Star Trek as well.
For this one glorious moment, I am a mere two degrees of separation from the absolute pinnacle of Western civilization. I could fall forever from here…
Interview with me at BSDNow
Kris and Allan of BSDNow interviewed me this week, about FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems.
Also about the Lucas Track (now up to ten events, I must be even nuttier than I thought!) at Penguicon, and about my new novels.
Also, how to intimidate Allan Jude into working harder. Always useful information.
Get the “Immortal Clay” sequel: Kipuka Blues
It’s taken far longer than it should have, but: you can now order the sequel to Immortal Clay, Kipuka Blues.
Due to the vagaries of indie publishing (discussed at the bottom of this post), the paperback version is available now. The ebook will be released on 5 April, but most readers can pre-order it now.
To my shock, more than one person has ordered the paperback. One of them picked up Immortal Clay in paper as well. Apparently the books are developing… fans. Fans who are unwilling to wait for the electronic version. Weird.
Anyway, you can find the book on pre-order at many of the usual suspects: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo. The iBooks pre-order has gone weirdly astray, and while I’m trying to get it fixed you just might have to wait until 5 April to order it.
The Kipuka Blues cover is based on me before my morning caffeine.
The obvious question is, why is the print book available before the ebook? Ebook release can be tightly scheduled, while the scheduling between my on-demand printer (CreateSpace) and the rest of the world is much more nebulous. I wanted enough time to receive a print proof, make corrections, get another proof, and get the book into stores. Weirdly, the first proofs came back… fine. No corrections needed. This means I was able to push the button and launch the print earlier.
As with the Mastery books, I’ve tried to make the Kipuka Blues a physical artifact worth owning. It’s by far the thickest book I’ve published, roughly twice the size of any FreeBSD Mastery book.
In a throwback to the 60s and 70s, the paperback edition is illustrated with black and white line art by the inimitable Brad McDevitt. (Actually, I tell a lie. Virgil Finlay could imitate Brad, but sadly Finlay died in 1971. With any other artist, this would be a guarantee that he’d quit working, but with Finlay I’m not quite comfortable guaranteeing that.)
And here’s the cover from the print edition. It different from the ebook cover in that you can pick it up and hold it. You can get a better look at the art by going to one of the bookstores linked to above.
I’ll start writing IC3, tentatively titled Bones Like Water, as soon as I finish writing $ git commit murder. At an hour a day, it’ll probably be well under way before BSDCan.
“FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” sponsorships ending soon
When I set up the FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS print and ebook sponsorships, I never considered when I should take them off sale.
Comments are due back from tech editors tomorrow, 28 March. I’ll immediately be processing them. This should take a couple days. Once I’ve made all the corrections, I’m sending the whole thing out for copyedit.
The sponsorship sale ends when the book goes for copyedit.
If you want to be a sponsor, act now.
If not, that’s perfectly cool too.
Free short story: “Butterfly Stomp”
My social media followers are probably sick of hearing me babble about my new novel, Butterfly Stomp Waltz. But it’s relevant here.
Last fall, I attended a Kris Rusch writing workshop. One result was a heist crime short story. Many people liked it and wanted more. Kris’ comment was (paraphrased), “This is a fine story as it is, but really, it wants to be the start of a novel.”
So I wrote BSW. People seem to like it. Now I’ve put the original short story up as a freebie. It’s a modern heist crime tale.
50% John McClane
50% Robin Hood
100% trouble
Reeling from the death of her lover and partner, freelance “exfiltration specialist” Billie Carrie Salton breaks into a high-tech, high-security biotechnology firm to steal their sickle cell anemia cure and broadcast it to the world.
In, out, announce. Easy.
Except Salton’s life never works that smoothly…
You can get Butterfly Stomp at Kobo, iBooks, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, and the myriad other national Amazon branches.
The cynical among you probably think that this is a marketing ploy, to get you to buy the novel. You wouldn’t be wrong. There’s a note at the end of the story that says “If you want more, get the novel!” But offering a small freebie is a good way to let people try your work. It’s why Costco gives away tastes of cheese and chocolate and fried calamari. And I don’t just want readers–I want customers. Repeat customers. That means making it easy for people who like the sort of thing I write to find my work.
I can attest that Costco’s cheese marketing plan works quite well, at least in my case. And I believe in learning from the greats.
First review of “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems”
Sunday Morning Linux Review episode 184 discusses FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems.
While SMLR is always worth listening to, if you want to cut right to the review (or, alternately, if you’re me coming back to look for good quotes to steal for publicity purposes), the review starts about 30 minutes in.
It’s about 1:11 into the unedited video.
Summary: the book does not suck. And some parts are actually interesting. Which is nice. The book did expose Mary to new ideas and sent her running for the manual and Wikipedia a few times, but learning is good for you, so that’s okay.
I should also note that while I offer free review copies to podcasters, SMLR insists on purchasing books for review. They say it keeps them unbiased. I won’t argue.
FreeBSD and pam_listfile
I’ve discovered unknown terrors while researching and writing PAM Mastery. Well, terrors previously unknown to me, at least. I’m certain that the OpenPAM and Linux-PAM developers are very much aware of them. (I’m also certain that they’re part of the reason DES keeps his hair cut so short, so that he can’t yank it out of his head in bloody chunks.)
Part of the writing process was building a giant spreadsheet listing operating systems, PAM versions, and which modules appear in each OS. Strictly speaking, OpenPAM proper contains very few modules. Most “OpenPAM” modules actually originate from FreeBSD. But people are free to use them, so they generally get lumped into the “OpenPAM module” bucket.
One module that’s conspicuous by its absence in pam_listfile. Pam_listfile.so lets you accept or reject access based on the username’s presence in a file. It’s much like the traditional BSD /etc/ftpusers functionality.
It’s a reasonable enough module. And I’m told that pam_listfile.so can be compiled to work on FreeBSD, but nobody’s bothered to submit a port. How to make it work is a perennial question on the FreeBSD mailing lists.
The good news is, you can easily emulate pam_listfile.so on FreeBSD using pam_exec. Pam_exec runs a command as part of the PAM chain. If the command returns 0, the module says to grant access. If the command returns 1, the module says to deny access. (Whether PAM obeys this instruction or not depends on the type of statement.)
Here I implement basic pam_listfile.so functionality in a shell script, pam_listfile.sh.
Enable pam_listfile.sh as an auth rule.
auth required pam_exec /usr/local/scripts/pam_listfile.sh
Now all you need is a script. This version of the script permits access if the username appears in /etc/validusers.
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/grep ^$PAM_USER$ /etc/validusers
return $?
And here’s a version that rejects access if the username appears in /etc/validusers, exactly like /etc/ftpusers. It’s a huge change, adding an entire exclamation point.
#!/bin/sh
! /usr/bin/grep ^$PAM_USER$ /etc/validusers
return $?
You could add more functions as you need. The important thing is to return either 0 or not-zero.
PAM Mastery is over half finished. I’ve completed the parts on “this is how PAM works” and have moved on to “here are some cool PAM modules that you might want to use.”
And my marketing department says I need to mention that I’m taking sponsors on the print and ebook versions of PAM Mastery.