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FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS (Version canadienne)

I’ve wondered for a while what to do about Allan Jude.

Allan is my co-author on FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. I could have written those books on my own, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

We have had one major disagreement, though: is it pronounced zee-F-S or zed-F-S? This has proven an intractable problem.

I’ve come up with a solution, though.

FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS – Canadian Version.

fmaz-canadian

Here’s the front text.

This book exists because Allan Jude is too generous for his own good.

Alan has aided my efforts to become a professional writer in ways that can never really be paid back. They can only be paid forward.

The only real disagreement we had while writing this book was on the pronunciation of ZFS. Is it zeeFS, or zedFS? This special edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS exists as a physical token of my appreciation.

What makes this book different from the regular edition?

First, the special Canadian cover.

The text is modified to be more palatable for Canadian readers.

This edition contains a footnote that does not appear in the standard edition.

And last, this edition has not been proofread or copyedited.

Thanks, Alan, for everything.

Michael W Lucas
24 May 2016

The catch is: it’s only available in print.

Only five of them exist. (The electronic originals have been destroyed, so I couldn’t exactly reproduce this if I wanted to.)

I have one.

Allan has three. (There’s a YouTube video of part of the presentation.)

One, and only one, will be on sale.

The only place to get it is at the BSDCan charity auction, benefiting the Ottawa Mission.

BSDCan attendees, this is your one and only one chance to get a copy of this exotic, rare object.

Ask Alan or myself for a peek at it.

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Getting Ahead of Blackmail

Here’s the interesting things about blackmail: it only works if the victim permits himself to be embarrassed. A victim who is willing to release everything renders himself invulnerable to such threats.

People have wondered how I make a living as a writer. It all depends on how you sell your product.

dealing1

dealing 2

dealing 3

_DWM4286_3_DxO

dealing 6

dealing 7

dealing 8

dealing 9

Sorry, David. You’ll have to buy your books like everyone else. Meet me in the alley if you’re still interested.

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Two new stories and a novella

In May, I started slogging through my backlog of fiction to be published. I’m happy to announce two new stories and a novella. Click on the cover images for more details on each.

Forced to Talk ebook coverFirst, I finally leveraged my technology experience into my fiction. The result is, of course, a DevOps murder mystery story. I can’t say that Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth is based on folks I know. But I can say that I know folks an awful lot like these folks.

Moonlight's ApplesThe story Moonlight’s Apples brings us Tough Biker Dude versus the Fairy Queen, in southwest Ontario. It’s not like any modern fairy tale you’ve read before.

Finally, I have a confession to make…

I’ve written a romance novella. With explosions, of course.

earthquake kitten kiss cover B

Earthquake Kitten Kiss is a spin-off from Butterfly Stomp Waltz, starring the most unlikely romance heroine ever, Liza Bradley.

In other fiction news: I tried to write a Montague Portal short story. It turned into a novella, and then grew into a novel. Hydrogen Sleets should be finished this month, and available August-ish. Then I finish another novel, git commit murder, and proceed to the next Butterfly book, Terrapin Sky Tango. After that it’s Immortal Clay book 3, tentatively titled Bones Like Water.

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Reality check for “PAM Mastery.”

Two blog posts in one day, after a few weeks of silence? It happens. Weirder still, there will be another tomorrow. I’m asking for help from my tech book readers here.

Some things are such an integral part of my life that I can’t imagine others are unfamiliar with them. I’m considering using one of them for “PAM Mastery,” but I must consider that perhaps not everyone understands it. I don’t want to say what particular part of my life I’m talking about, as that would invalidate the test here.

So, with the following text, do you:

1) get the reference
2) if you do NOT get the reference, do you understand it anyway?

A chain of PAM controls don’t resemble the strict allow/deny syntax you’ll find in applications like packet filters, web servers, and other Access Control Lists. They’re more like a long-standing committee in a centuries-old educational institution steeped in tradition and ritual, where each member has an unusual name, baroque responsibilities, and unusual privileges.

This committee votes on authentication in a specified, stately order. Each member has specific ways they can vote. Perhaps the Archchancellor starts the vote, and can either say “yes” or reject the whole proposal before anyone else gets a chance. The Dean can vote “no comment” or “no,” but doesn’t actually get to vote in favor of anything. The Senior Wrangler can vote either “no” or “yes, so long as nobody else objects.” If voting reaches as far as the Lecturer in Recent Runes he can either stay silent or declare, “yes, dang it, and the vote’s over, I win!”

Meanwhile, the Librarian has a seat at the table but can only take notes.

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BSDCan Intro Session Volunteers Wanted

A person’s first visit to a particular tech con can be overwhelming. BSDCan is now having an introductory session for new attendees, to try to ease them into the event. Somehow, I’m running it.

From 6-9 PM on Thursday night I’ll be in DMS 1160 to greet new BSDCan attendees and discuss how the conference runs with folks new to BSDCan.

I would really like someone from each of the BSD projects to help me ease new attendees into the con. Ideally I’d be able to say “Oh, you want FreeBSD? Let me introduce you to Fred, he’s a FreeBSD guy,” or OpenBSD, or whatever project they’re interested in.

This will be pretty informal. I plan to order carryout and hang out.

The event concludes at 9 PM, leaving time for a gelato run, of course.

In my mind, new attendees need to know about:

  • breakfast and lunch
  • harassment policy (Abusing other convention goers will really tick me off. And I’m on the BSDCan committee, so I take that seriously.)
  • Opening and closing sessions
  • The closing auction
  • Presumably, they’ve read the talks schedule before registering–but if not, we’ll have it.
  • BSDA testing–they’re probably not prepared to take it, but maybe next year?
  • evening open events, like the Royal Oak, the Hacker Lounge, and the FreeBSD Doc Sprint

Can you think of anything else I should add to this list?

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Books for “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” print sponsors

I return from my literary forced death march writing class in Oregon to find this.

IMAG0374

Which I have partially transformed into gifts for the folks who were kind enough to sponsor FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS.

IMAG0375

I’m heading for the post office now, to relieve myself of the responsibility for these.

Mind you, one of these gets delivered to Perry, Michigan, about a 90 minute drive away. It did occur to me to drive up there and hand-deliver the book. But that a) is stalkery, and b) uses up time I need to finish preparing for the Lucas track at Penguicon this weekend.

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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

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“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.