Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 69

BSDNow.tv, featuring… me!

The fine folks at BSDNow.tv have requested my presence this Wednesday for an interview. We’ll talk sudo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and whatever else comes to mind.

You can watch it live, this Wednesday at 2PM EST.

PS: Hey, boss, I’ll be out Wednesday afternoon. Personal business.

FreeBSD Jails and ntpd

I’ve written elsewhere how daemons running on jail servers (the main host, not the imprisoned machines) should listen only on a single address. They shouldn’t bind to all addresses on the machine.

Your average empty FreeBSD install has two problem children: syslogd and ntpd. Adding syslogd_flags="-ss" to /etc/rc.conf handles the first. But FreeBSD’s included ntpd binds to port 123 on all addresses on the machine.

You can run jails while running ntpd. The jail won’t crash in flames. But the jail...

Happy Halloween!

And what’s Halloween without a ghost story? A high-tech ghost story, even.

If you don’t care for fiction, there’s always true horror of my real life.

“Sudo Mastery” print + ebook bundle via Amazon

I’ve mentioned this before in various forums and in passing, but it bears a small emphasis.

Some people want books in both ebook and print. I’m not set up to do that, but Amazon is making that happen through their Matchbook program. The general idea is that if you bought a book in paper, you can get the ebook version at a steep discount.

I’ve put both existing Mastery paperbacks in the program. If you’ve bought the print book from Amazon, you can get the electronic version for $2.99. When Sudo...

“Sudo Mastery” ebook widely available, and acknowledgements

At long last, Sudo Mastery is now available in ebook form on most platforms.

You can get it at my bookstore or Amazon.

It’s also available at Smashwords, but Smashwords doesn’t support footnotes. They do support a workaround that puts all footnotes together at the end of a chapter or the end of the book, but it’ll take some work on my part to make that happen.

It’s not at Barnes & Noble yet, because their new Nook Press application completely mangled the book’s formatting. As I sell an average o...

checking group membership in Ansible templates

I use SolusVM as a virtualization solution, mainly because it’s pretty cheap and mostly effective. The new web-managed migration feature requires that the master node have SSH access into the slave nodes. As root. (Insert lots of swearing here.)

This isn’t a problem, except that I centrally manage my OpenSSH configuration with Ansible. I don’t want all of my hosts to permit the master SolusVM node to log in as root; I only want the Solus hosts to get that setting, and even then only from the m...

Sudo Mastery off to copyeditor

I just shipped the tech-reviewed copy of Sudo Mastery off to the copyeditor. She’ll have it back to me in a few days, and the book will move into production immediately thereafter.

This means that the pre-order discount will expire soon. How soon is soon? It’s soon.

Now I’m off to work on one of my other 2013 goals. Thanks to my appendix’s untimely detonation at the beginning of the year and my Europe trip I won’t accomplish everything on that list, but that’s no reason to not get as many of th...

EuroBSDCon, and Sudo Mastery

How’s that for diverse topics in one post?

I just got back from EuroBSDCon 2013 on Malta. The EuroBSDCon Foundation and Andre Opperman did a great job with the conference, and presented one of the best sets of talks and keynotes and related programs I’ve seen in years. It’s motivated me to try to improve BSDCan, but I’ll babble about that in another post.

I followed EuroBSDCon with a few days in Paris, to talk to other authors, network, and figure out some “business of writing” stuff. Plus see...

“Sudo Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

Thursday night, I finished the first draft of Sudo Mastery. Today, I went through the manuscript, removed my known tics, discovered a few more tics that needed killing, cleaned up bits and pieces, and now have a work ready for technical review.

Which is where you lot come in. I’m looking for people with sudo experience to read the book and tell me where I’ve screwed up. My screw-ups usually come in two flavors:

1) I’m technically wrong.

2) I use something in a way other people don’t

3) I don’t in...

First draft of “Sudo Mastery” complete

I just typed the last words of the first draft of Sudo Mastery.

The completed first draft is available for early purchasers. As it’s no longer an incomplete draft, I’ve raised the early purchase price to $8.99. That’s more than the really early buyers paid, but less than the final price. (Selling the early drafts from my own bookstore lets me experiment, so I’m ratcheting up the price to see what happens.)

What happens now?

First, I take a couple days and do something else. Anything else. This i...