Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 56

randi vs xmj

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking me for my opinion on the Randi – xmj FreeBSD issue.

Short short answer: I am withholding comment until we hear some kind of response from FreeBSD’s core team. Or until we don’t.

Short answer: This looks really bad for FreeBSD’s leaders and the Foundation.

If a volunteer project has a volunteer who is honestly so dysfunctional that he doesn’t understand why he is offensive, the project does not need him. And the volunteer needs to get help until he’s capabl...

randi vs jmx

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking me for my opinion on the Randi – jmx FreeBSD issue.

Short short answer: I am withholding comment until we hear some kind of response from FreeBSD’s core team. Or until we don’t.

Short answer: This looks really bad for FreeBSD’s leaders and the Foundation.

If a volunteer project has a volunteer who is honestly so dysfunctional that he doesn’t understand why he is offensive, the project does not need him. And the volunteer needs to get help until he’s capabl...

“FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” disclaimer

I’m going through the tech edits on FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems, integrating them into the manuscript so that it can go to copyedit.

As this book is available for early access purchase, without technical review, the manuscript starts with a disclaimer. The first step in prepping this manuscript is removing the disclaimer.

In my opinion, the disclaimers are often the most useful part of my tech books. I’m preserving this one for posterity.

FIRST DRAFT. NOT FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION. F...

My SSH talk now on YouTube

For some value of now, that is. I just realized I forgot to post this.

My November 11, 2015 mug.org talk about SSH is now on YouTube. This is one way to lose 90 minutes.

“FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” early draft available!

You can now get the in-progress but complete first draft of “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” at Tilted Windmill Press.

Buy it now, get 10% off. You get access to the early version as a PDF. When the final book is released, you’ll get the final EPUB, mobi, and print PDF versions.

This draft contains all the content I intend for this book, but it has not been tech reviewed. Tech reviewers have received the manuscript, and are busily marking all the ways that I am wrong, wrong, wrong.

Th...

Inaugural SemiBUG meeting notes

Last night was the first semibug.org meeting, at the Hazel Park Raceway. Eleven people attended.

The next meeting will be at 7:00 PM, 17 December 2015, at the Hazel Park Raceway.

The fourth floor of the HPR clubhouse was actually quite suitable for a user group meeting. HPR has horse races on Friday and Saturday night during spring and summer, but this time of year it relies on live videos of races in warm places. We had a conference table, but wound up sitting in chairs in a big circle while...

first semibug.org meeting next Tuesday

The first meeting for theSoutheast Michigan BSD User Group, aka SEMIBUG, will be next Tuesday, 17 November 2015, at the Hazel Park Raceway restaurant.

We’ll discuss what sort of meeting we want, when the regular meeting will happen, where it will be, and suchlike. We’ll probably also draft someone to fix the website. (By fix, I mean “burn it to the ground and try again.”)

The restaurant menu is very minimal thanks to the season, but after the meeting interested parties can head out to one of...

Detroit-area BSD user group, take 2

Fifteen years ago, I tried to organize a BSD user group in southeast Michigan.

That effort failed because of a lack of a steady place to meet.

The memory of that failure has faded with time. So I’m trying again. This time, the Southeast Michigan BSD User Group, or SEMIBUG, has a web site and a mailing list.

We still need to find a place to meet consistently, but I’m more confident that a few of us working together can do so. Mainly because I’m an optimistic idiot.

So, if you’re in the Detroit...

freebsd-update: “/usr/sbin/freebsd-update: cannot open files/.gz: No such file or directory”

This morning, I finally updated my web server to FreeBSD 10.2-p6 using freebsd-update. Normally I like freebsd-update, but this morning it decided to be cranky.

As usual, it was cranky because I didn’t know what I was doing.

First, I should say that I don’t need to update my hosts that often. If there’s, say, a mountd(8) security advisory, I don’t bother. And when I ran bunches of FreeBSD boxes, I ran freebsd-update through ansible.

This means I’m not terribly familiar with the output.

So, I...

50% TWP titles (and more) at Kobo.com

If you’re a Kobo user, I’ve got a heck of a deal for you. All of my Tilted Windmill Press titles, fiction and nonfiction, are available for half off with a coupon code. This includes books like FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, SSH Mastery, and Immortal Clay, but excludes my No Starch titles like Absolute FreeBSD and Absolute OpenBSD.

It’s not just my books either. All self-published titles are eligible.

Here’s the coupon codes and eligible dates, by country.

Canada:
October 28th – October 31st
Promo Co...