Absolute Bsd: The Ultimate Guide to Free Bsd

by Michael W. Lucas, Jordan Hubbard (Foreword by)

Michael W. Lucas is a network/security engineer with extensive experience working with high-availability systems. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Absolute BSD , Absolute OpenBSD , Cisco Routers for the Desperate , and PGP & GPG , all from No Starch Press.

Genres: Computers, Technical, Reference

565 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2002

About the author

Michael W. Lucas is the author of fifty-odd critically-acclaimed nonfiction books. As Michael Warren Lucas, he's written several novels.

Reviews

[Joseph II · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll admit, that even being a Unix user for two and a half decades the concept of BSD totally scared me. Dealing with "slices" instead of "partitions," and "ports" instead of "updates/upgrades" totally threw me for a loop. Once I grabbed this No Starch guide, I felt a little better about tackling FreeBSD. That level of confidence is easy to gain from this text - step-by-step instructions with "screen shots" (line printouts is a more accurate term for Unix-like command line systems) allowed me to compare what I typed in versus what I expected.

Too many people say "information like this is on the Internet, so why should I buy a book?" True, the information is on the net... but what happens when your server crashes and you can't get connected to the 'Net? Misalign some internal settings and you're just pinging a Loopback address... what do you do next? Absolute BSD will guide you through the repair and reconstruction phase of fixing your server.

The best part about FreeBSD is its utility as the backbone of the Internet. Many Domain Name Service (DNS) systems, web servers, and FTP sites use FreeBSD (or its BSD cousins, like NetBSD) to maintain very high uptime rates and ease of upgrade through the Ports tree. This book took away the mysticism of using FreeBSD and my fear along with it. A well-used, cracked binding, dog-eared copy resides on my bookshelf, and if you use (or plan to use) FreeBSD, you should have one too.

[knoba · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Contents
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
1. Installation
2. Getting More Help
3. Read This Before You Break Something Else! (Backup and Recovery).
4. Kernel Games
5. Networking
6. Upgrading FreeBSD
7. Securing Your System
8. Advanced Security Features
9. Too Much Information About /etc
10. Making Your System Useful
11. Advanced Software Management
12. Finding Hosts With DNS
13. Managing Small Network Services
14. Email Services
15. Web and FTP Services
16. Filesystems and Disks
17. RAID
18. System Performance
19. Now What's It Doing?
20. System Crashes and Panics
21. Desktop FreeBSD
Afterword
Appendix. Some Useful SYSCTL MIBs
Index