Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 80
March 1, 2012
SolusVM KVM offline migration with shared storage
I'm building a new virtualization cloud with SolusVM, KVM, and a bit of Xen (to make use of older hardware). Each machine has its own hard disk, but it only holds the local operating system. All virtual machines reside on cheap iSCSI storage, so I can easily migrate VMs from one compute node to another. The goal being, of course, to separate service failures from hardware failures. (I still have to deal with possible storage failures, of course, but hot-swap hard drive arrays reduce my risk s...
February 29, 2012
SSH Mastery print now on Amazon
You can now buy the print SSH Mastery from Amazon. The print version isn't yet linked to the ebook version, but that will happen within 1-3 days.
To my surprise, Amazon has not discounted the book. I don't know why. I spoke with their author support desk, and was told that some books get discounted and some do not, according to some internal algorithm that only Amazon knows. All of my other books get discounted before publication. I assume that SSH Mastery will be discounted as well, but I...
February 24, 2012
SSH Mastery Print Here
Today, I received a good proof of SSH Mastery. All of the errors I know of are fixed.
I've ordered 200 books for the OpenBSD Project. Those books should be manufactured this weekend and delivered next week. (For the record, the OpenBSD guys have been a pleasure to deal with.)
Amazon should have the books available in ten days or so, Barnes & Noble and other Ingram-connected bookstores a while afterwards.
If you absolutely must have the print book now, you can order it through my CreateSpace...
February 23, 2012
Remote Web Browsing via OpenSSH and PuTTY
I'm installing SolusVM as a virtualization management system. It lets you manage your private cloud via a Web browser, set up resellers, and so on. When you first log in, the administrative interface locks itself down so that you can only log in from one IP address, in a sort of implicit whitelist. You must explicitly add other addresses. That's fine, even reasonable. I had three address ranges to add: my office, the headquarters, and Fearless Leader's office. So I went into the management...
February 17, 2012
Print pre-order for "SSH Mastery" now available
The OpenBSD folks have made pre-orders available for SSH Mastery.
I'm giving the books to the OpenBSD Project at cost, and they're selling them at list as a fund-raiser. I make nothing on books ordered through OpenBSD, but the money will go to further OpenBSD, OpenSSH, PF, and who knows what else. I'm going to imagine that the money will support the annual developer barbeque, as buying beer is more fun than buying hardware.
I will make a decent profit on books sold through Amazon, Barnes ...
"SSH Mastery" print status
Thursday, I received the first print proofs of SSH Mastery.
Initial impressions: the print version looks good. The photo doesn't do the nice glossy cover and bright colors justice, but:
After careful inspection, though, I found a few errors. The interior images are not as sharp as I would like. Some of these I can't really help: printouts of screenshots look like crap. But I'm more concerned about pixellation in diagrams and images.
Plus, there's an extraneous colon on the back cover.
If I want t...
February 16, 2012
January "SSH Mastery" sales, by the numbers
I've promised several authors to share the results of my self-publishing experiment with SSH Mastery. I don't have complete data yet, but I do have sales numbers for January from Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.
Some caveats here:
This includes only "SSH Mastery." I have removed my fiction from the totals. (Fiction sales are considerably lower, but growing.)February's initial results are much lower than January's. January's sales are obviously to my "hard-core fans" and people close to the...February 14, 2012
Installing WHMCS on FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE
Or, if you prefer: "WHMCS versus PHP." Blogged for the next sysadmin searching Google.
$DAYJOB recently acquired WHMCS to help automate virtual server provisioning, billing, and so on. According to everything I've read, WHMCS runs just fine on FreeBSD, so I installed the prerequisites on a 9.0-i386 machine. As with any server for PHP-based Web sites, I verified that the server processed PHP with a simple phpinfo() page. I then grabbed the WHMCS tarball (no link, you must be a customer...
February 7, 2012
New "SSH Mastery" review posted
I have the print layout basically finished. The print cover is in process, and the index is underway. Hopefully ordering print proofs later this week.
February 6, 2012
Basic DNSSEC with BIND 9.9
Everybody knows that DNS is insecure, and DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is supposed to fix that. I know that several of my readers consider DNSSEC suboptimal, but it's the standard, so we get to live with it. I recently got DNSSEC working on BIND 9.9. As I write this 9.9 is in Release Candidate state, but the functionality should be basically unchanged. My goals for DNSSEC on BIND were to manually edit my zone files, but have the DNS server maintain the keys. BIND 9.9 makes this...
