Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 63
October 24, 2014
FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials cover
Here’s an early version of the cover for FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials.
The text is subject to change, but the art (from the inimitable Eddie Sharam) is final.
FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials
You might also be interested in the painting Liberty Leading the People.
The post FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials cover appeared first on blather.michaelwlucas.com.
October 15, 2014
Revoked and Replaced OpenPGP Key
I uploaded a GPG key to subkeys.pgp.net back in 2005. It’s well past time for me to replace it. I covered creating your revocation certificate back in PGP & GPG, but didn’t actually write about using that revocation certificate. Nine years later… yeah, I better figure this out.
So Io to the machine with my keypair, and create my revocation certificate.
# gpg --output oldgpg.revoke.asc --gen-revoke E68C49BC
sec 1024D/E68C49BC 2005-02-21 Michael Warren Lucas Jr (Author, consultant, sysadmin)
Yep,...
“Storage Essentials” first draft complete!
The first draft of FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is now complete and available on the Tilted Windmill Press site.
My target for a Mastery book is for it to be about 30K words. That seems a fair length for a $10 technology ebook. FMSE is 45K words, or about 50% more than that. At that price point, it’ll be a bargain. The print version will probably run more than the $20 I prefer, but we’ll see what happens.
As it’s a complete draft, the price has been raised to $8.99. Once the book goes th...
October 8, 2014
I’m changing careers
My employer was just bought by another company. I find myself unemployed. This was not unexpected, so I’ve had time to think about what to do next.
I could have another IT job by three PM by picking up the phone and calling my friend Pam. If Pam was out of town, I’d call half a dozen other people and have a job by noon tomorrow. I’d certainly get a raise over what I’m making now–actually, given that I specifically chose a lower-paying job with less stress, I could double my salary. That’s what...
September 23, 2014
Shuffling Partitions on FreeBSD
I’ve recently moved my personal web sites to https://www.vultr.com/, using virtual machines instead of real hardware. (I’ve caught up to the 2000s, hurrah!) I didn’t track server utilization, so I provisioned the machines based on a vague gut feeling.
The web server started spewing signal 11s, occasionally taking down the site by killing mysql. Investigation showed that this server didn’t have enough memory. How can 1GB RAM not be enough for WordPress and MySQL? Why, back in my day–
<SLAP>
Right....
<August 21, 2014
Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes
BSDs generally break their PHP packages into smaller units than most Linux distribution. This means that you need extra packages when following installation guides. I’m installing Phabricator on FreeBSD because I want ZFS under it.
This is the complete list of PHP modules and related stuff I needed to install to get Phabricator to run on FreeBSD 10.0p7/amd64. Don’t use PHP 5.5, as some modules are only available with PHP 5.4.
php5
mod_php5
php5-curl
php5-gd
php5-iconv
php5-mbstring
php5-mysql
php5-pcn...
August 12, 2014
New autobiography chapter: The Thumbs
Lots of people are sad today, it seemed a good time to put this up. And as I got yelled at by people the last time I didn’t mention this on the blog:
There’s a new autobiography chapter up.
Why am I writing an autobiography? I’m not. But these are stories I tell over and over again, so I put them up in a central place.
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August 6, 2014
FreeBSD ZFS snapshots with zfstools
In my recent survey of ZFS snapshot automation tools, I short-listed zfstools and zfsnap. I’ll try both, but first we’ll cover FreeBSD ZFS snapshots with zfstools. Zfstools includes a script for creating snapshots, another for removing old snapshots, and one for snapshotting MySQL databases. The configuration uses only ZFS attributes and command line arguments via cron.
Start by deciding which ZFS filesystems you want to snapshot. The purpose of snapshotting is to let you get older versions of...
July 30, 2014
a survey of FreeBSD ZFS snapshot automation tools
Why automatically snapshot filesystems? Because snapshots let you magically fall back to older versions of files and even the operating system. Taking a manual snapshot before a system upgrade is laudable, but you need to easily recover files when everything goes bad. So I surveyed my Twitter followers to see what FreeBSD ZFS snapshot automation tools they use.
The tools:
A few people use custom shell scripts of varying reliability and flexibility. I’m not going to write my own shell script. Th...
July 24, 2014
Google Play notes
A couple months ago, I put my Tilted Windmill Press books up on Google Play. I firmly believe that having your books widely available is a good thing. Google Play let me be DRM-free, and while their discounting system is a pain to work around, I’d like people to be able to get my books easily. I’ve sold six books through Google Play, which isn’t great but hey, it’s six readers I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Amazon is overwhelmingly my biggest reseller. I get over 90% of my self-publishing income f...
