Michael W. Lucas's Blog

April’s Abjurational Sausage

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of April, and to the public at the beginning of May. Not a Patronizer? You could be. It’s a terrible deal, but you could be.

I’ve considered myself well-prepared for personal financial disaster, but we’re not headed into personal financial disaster. We’re headed into a global one. I would say that I’m conservative–I save money, look after my family, mind my own business–but the reactionaries have stolen that term from me. Plus, I’m not conservative ...

Notes on caddy as QUIC reverse proxy with mac_portacl

As I wrote yesterday, I need QUIC for my web sites. The servers I have data on run FreeBSD, because ZFS. I use Apache everywhere, because it’s what I learned back in the 486 Age. My web site is critical to my business, so I must minimize downtime. I chose to implement a Caddy reverse proxy, because it looked easier than Envoy or migrating to nginx. (Nothing against either tool, of course.)

These are my notes, not a tutorial. If they help you, that’s grand. I pillaged Thomas Hurt’s post for this...

87: Farawayistan is Fubar

(Trouble this morning. Had to pull and republish this episode. Sorry if you see it twice, or if it didn’t work the first time.)

I really do need to get on the orc Christmas story. So here’s a bit from the networking book.

Enterprise environments have monitoring systems. Monitoring systems alert people. Those people recognize common alerts. “The link to Farawayistan is fubar again, ignore it.” Certain alerts are expected. “The ERP team started their patches two minutes early? The line manager wil...

“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd Edition” Update

“The book is underway.” What does that mean? The first half is largely done. The Windows stuff is PowerShell. The Debian stuff uses ip. FreeBSD is the reference Unix. I wrote a chapter on what folks need to know about TLS, to go in the middle. I sadly sent that to Bob Beck for his comments. I understand where TLS has been, but Bob has good insight into where it will be.

Bob’s a good guy, but he also has cause for a lawful quarrel with me. Whenever I start to feel depressed, I listen to that reco...

86: Take Quite a Long Time to Fail

Here’s a chunk of the networking book.

Standard netstat attempts to show hostnames instead of IP addresses. This means your server performs a reverse DNS lookup on every IP address it exchanges traffic with. On a busy server, this might mean hundreds or thousands of lookups. The output pauses for each lookup. Many hosts have no reverse DNS, so these lookups can take quite a long time before they fail.

Service names also appear with a human-friendly name rather than a port number whenever possibl...

More Titles in Direct Print Sales

In spare minutes, I’ve been expanding my direct print sale operation. You can now get all of these in my bookstore. If you pay for the print book, you get the ebook free.

titles available in print on tiltedwindmillpress.com, 21 April 2025

I have other books in the system, but am waiting for the print proofs to arrive. They come from a new printer (BookVault). Before I tell you to buy a book, I need to know that BV can produce the book as intended. They’re competent, but everyone handles PDFs sli...

“Laserblasted” Kickstarter over

It funded. My gratitude to everyone who backed, spread the word, or called me mad.

My goal on book Kickstarters is deliberately set below actual production cost. I want it to fund. I’m going to publish it anyway, and I’d rather get $500 to production cost than set a goal of the actual price and fail to fund.

I’d like to think that the US government deliberately decided to trash my campaign, but no. They trashed everyone equally. I’ve run enough Kickstarters that I know how they go. Kickstarter p...

85: George is Asleep

Here’s some of the new Networking for System Administrators, because while the Laserblasted Kickstarter ends today I am utterly sick of shilling it.

Think of the network as a conference room. At the physical layer you have a table and chairs. The room is a broadcast domain. Each chair is a host, with a unique MAC address.

As an IP network, the table can hold a number of chairs equal to a power of two. Each chair has a unique IP address. Two of the chairs, the top and bottom addresses, are ricket...

An Economic Implosion as viewed through Kickstarter

Let me say up front: the whole Laserblasted project is daft. Yes, it’s a real novel. No, you don’t need to see the movie to understand it. (You don’t need to see the movie, period.) My alpha readers say it’s worthy. It’s not a novelization of the film. The marketing wrote itself.

But it’s daft.

This post is not a complaint, merely an observation. This is my career, and I knew the risks when I got into it. I am grateful for any support folks offer me, and I do not blame anyone for protecting them...

84: A Fresh Hot Burger

The Laserblasted Kickstarter is still going so technically, I ought to share a snippet from that. It’s the last chance for that to be a work-in-progress. Instead, here’s a bit from the new Networking for System Administrators.

These common transport protocols all run over IPv4 and IPv6 alike. Each has minor updates to match the underlying IP stack, but the basic concepts such as port numbers and connection state remain unchanged. Most differences are only visible if you analyze packet headers.

...