Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 66

BSDCan sold to Oracle?

I am shocked and appalled. I’ve helped with BSDCan for many many years now, investing my limited time and energy into helping it become the best BSD conference on this side of the planet.

And now Dan Langille has sold the whole thing. To Oracle.

I know that “make something awesome, then sell out to a big company” is standard tech industry practice. But I never expected Langille to figure out a way to sell BSDCan. It never even occured to me that he would sell out our community. Either I have a...

DNSSEC-verified SSL Certificates, the Standard Way

DANE, or DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities, is a protocol for stuffing public key and or public key signatures into DNS. As standard DNS is forged easily, you can’t safely do this without DNSSEC. With DNSSEC, however, you now have an alternative way to verify public keys. Two obvious candidates for DANE data are SSH host keys and SSL certificate fingerprints. In this post I take you through using DNSSEC-secured DNS to verify web site SSL certificates via DNSSEC (sometimes called DNSS...

Mailing Lists, featuring: me!

And now, for my newest low in narcissism.

I have mailing lists where I will announce new projects. If you want me to push information to you, rather than pull it from my blog/Twitter/whatever, go sign up.

NYCBSDCon 2014 Video, and 2014 appearances

The video of my NYCBSDCon talk is now on available on YouTube.

This talk is a little rougher than most I give. I felt worn-out before I even spoke on Saturday night. I woke up Sunday morning with tonsils the size of tennis balls (which made airport security interesting, let me tell you. “No, those aren’t bombs, let me fly home dang it!”).

So, on the day of NYCBSDCon I was obviously sliding down the ramp into illness.

I don’t script my talks beforehand. Yes, I have bullet points on my slides, but...

Running Ancient Rsync

Another “write it down so I don’t forget what I did” post.

Some of the systems I’m responsible for are file storage machines, running rsync 3.0 or 3.1 as a daemon. Every hour, an ancient Solaris machine sends files to it using rsync 2.3.1. The billing team uses these files to create bills.

Thursday, I rebooted the machine. And the rsync stopped working with:

rsyncd[3582]: rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [Receiver]

rsyncd[3582]: rsync error: error in rsync protocol...

Trying poo-DRE-eh — uh, poudriere

This is my poudriere tutorial. There are many like it. But this one is mine. I built mine with resources like the BSDNow tutorial and the FreeBSD Forums tutorial. While all poudriere tutorials are inadequate, mine is inadequate in new and exciting ways. I’m writing it for my benefit, but what the heck, might as well post it here. (If you read this and say “I learned nothing new,” well, I warned you.)

Your package building system must run the newest version of FreeBSD you want to support. I hav...

Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script

Well, partially scripted, that is.

For installing large numbers of identical machines, proceed directly to the PC-BSD installer. It’s easy to configure, very reliable, and generally just rocks. If you’re accustomed to automatic installers like Kickstart, you’ll find the PC-BSD installer trivially easy.

I frequently have to install non-identical machines for special purposes, such as testing or unique file stores or EDI. Most of these are virtual machines. It seems that ZFS filesystems compress...

ifup-local on bridge members on CentOS

I run a bunch of CentOS 6 physical servers as QEMU virtualization devices. These hosts have two NICs, one for management and one for virtual machine bridges.

When you use Linux for virtualization, it’s important to increase the amount of memory for network transmit and receive buffers. You also need to disable GSO and TSO, to improve performance and to avoid gigabytes of kernel error messages every day. You can do this with ethtool(8). First, let’s check the existing ring sizes.

# ethtool -g et...

New reviews

There’s been a few new reviews out lately. First, two from Grant Taylor, on Sudo Mastery and SSH Mastery. Thank you, Grant!

Yesterday, a review of Sudo Mastery appeared on Slashdot. I haven’t been reviewed on Slashdot since Absolute OpenBSD came out. No, not the second edition–the original, in 2003. So this is cool. Thank you, “Saint Aardvark.” (Yes, I can figure out his real name, but if he goes by that, who am I to argue?)

As a result of these reviews, I now simultaneously have the #1 and #4...

2013 Failures and 2014 Goals

I set goals for 2013. And I failed to meet them. I promised three short nonfiction books, Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition, and a novel. You got AO2e and two short nonfiction books, DNSSEC Mastery and Sudo Mastery.

While setting goals is important, exploring why you fail to meet those goals is just as important. Driving factors behind these goals boil down to three things.

These were pretty ambitious goals
Traveled to EuroBSDCon in September
January’s emergency appendectomy

I knew this was ambitious b...