Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 78

Splitting blog?

I usually post two different sorts of items here: tech articles, and publishing articles. Would you lot prefer I did two separate blogs? I would probably still feed both to third parties such as Twitter and Facebook, but it appears that most of my readers use RSS.

If nobody cares, I’ll leave things as they are.

Floating business ideas past my readers

As I beaver away on the new Absolute OpenBSD book, I’m pondering options for what to do afterwards. Part of that pondering concerns the business aspect of publishing. And I want your opinion.

This blog post is about tech books — or, more generally, “highly researched non-entertainment nonfiction,” a category which includes but is not limited to technology books. I’m explicitly excluding fiction and entertainment nonfiction. I’m discussing books meant to help the reader make more money, or at l...

New review of “SSH Mastery”

Samiuela LV Taufa was kind enough to write a review of SSH Mastery. Thank you, sir!

For those who are wondering why I haven’t posted much lately: I’m beavering away at the new Absolute OpenBSD, getting ready for a summer writing workshop with Kris Rusch, trying to get an article together for BSD Magazine, and when my brain is too tired to put words together, assembling a print version of Vicious Redemption.

So yes, I’m working. You just can’t see any results yet.

Truth versus Art

There’s been a slow-burning furor over dishonesty in “creative nonfiction,” most recently in this Fact vs. Artistic License in Creative Nonfiction post. Now and then someone accuses me of making stuff up in my books. For the record, here’s the truth.

I lie. I make stuff up all the time. But not technical stuff.

One technique I use in each tech book is to create a narrator. The narrator is not me. I don’t actually blackmail coworkers, as the narrator of Network Flow Analysis recommends. The narr...

Death of a Web Server

My first day at BSDCan, my Web sites died. Hard drive failure. The latest backups are defective. I think I’ve recovered the blog, but some links have changed, dang it. I’ll have to learn more about mod_rewrite to fix them. Web site is next. RSS readers will see some repeats, sorry.

Other than that, BSDCan was awesome. As usual. In fact, it was just awesome as expected. So it was kind of routine. But still awesome.

50% off sale on my No Starch ebooks through O’Reilly, 4th May only

Yep, Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Absolute FreeBSD are 50% off when you buy through No Starch Press’s O’Reilly distributor.

And other books. By other authors. Most of whom are more awesome than I am, so I’m not going to mention any names. Like Peter Hansteen. Or Joe Kong. Or Tom Limoncelli. Or Chris Sanders. Because they sure don’t need the press.

This is part of the EFF’s Day Against DRM. Use the code DRMFREE to get 50% off ebooks via O’Reilly.

Go to the O’Reilly site for all the details...

Configuring OpenBSD to use RADIUS auth

I have a love-hate relationship with RADIUS. RADIUS is the cheap white glue of authentication. Just about everything speaks it, so you can use it as cheap glue to unify passwords across your gear. But it’s a finicky protocol, with lots of edge cases, and those edges can be SHARP.

Okay, perhaps it’s more of a tolerate-hate relationship. But still.

OpenBSD supports using RADIUS to authenticate user accounts. Why would you possibly want to do this? For one thing, if you’re using authpf, it gives y...

50% off sale on my No Starch ebooks through O’Reilly, today only

Yep, Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Absolute FreeBSD are 50% off when you buy through No Starch Press’s O’Reilly distributor.

And other books. By other authors. Most of whom are more awesome than I am, so I’m not going to mention any names. Like Peter Hansteen. Or Joe Kong. Or Tom Limoncelli. Or Chris Sanders. Because they sure don’t need the press.

This is part of the EFF’s Day Against DRM. Use the code DRMFREE to get 50% off ebooks via O’Reilly.

Go to the O’Reilly site for all the details...

Debugging RANCID

I’m a big fan of RANCID for managing configurations for embedded devices, such as most routers and switches. While you can go buy CiscoWorks, OpenView, or any number of proprietary products, RANCID is good enough for the overwhelming majority of us. (Those products do have other advantages, but simple configuration revision control isn’t one of them.)

For those who haven’t used RANCID: it logs into your devices every hour, gets the device configuration, and compares it to the stored configurat...

And now for something completely different…

Last August a friend of mine, Colin Harvey, died of a sudden unexpected stroke. He was in my fiction critique group, and we spend several years bashing each other’s efforts. He made it as a novelist, with two books to his credit. I haven’t reached that. Yet.

Today, I learned that one of his stories had been filmed.

The funny thing is, this film is based on a challenge he set in the critique group, based on random overheard phrases provided by group members. Every story had to incorporate all o...