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BSD Hacks
from the but-doesn't-wheeze dept.
Dru writes the BSD Basics column on O'Reilly & Associates' OnLamp. Her clarity and fluid style are perfect for those looking to understand aspects of the BSD operating systems. I have had some email communications with Dru about various New York City *BSD User Group-related activities, and managed to speak with her several times at BSDCan this past May.
Like most computer nerds, Dru has a sense of humor. Unlike most, however, she's actually funny.
BSD Hacks is the first book that is almost solely focused on hacks for sysadmins, without boring you with the details for basic operating system installation and configuration that has been so well documented elsewhere. BSD Hacks is not just for sysadmins, though. Intermediate and advanced BSD users will also find the book an excellent tool. For those who find difficulty in BSD installs and other fundamentals, on the other hand, it's best to start with the FreeBSD Handbook, the NetBSD Guide or the OpenBSD FAQ.
There's lots of good hacks buried in the various BSD books, around the internet in different HOWTOs and tutorials. But BSD hacking is the sole purpose of BSD Hacks; there's no need to browse through install screens and overviews of TCP/IP before getting to the heart of the matter.
With 100 listed hacks, multiplied by an impressive level of detailed angles for each, Dru provides an array that demands the placement of this book right in your server room, not in a pile of "must-read-at-some-distant-point-in-the-future" texts.
The majority of hacks are applicable to all the BSDs, including Darwin and OS X, although some are specific to one BSD or another.
This review obviously can't list every hack, although you would be smart to sit and work through the book yourself over a weekend or two. But it is possible to provide a good flavor of BSD Hacks in brief. O'Reilly and Associates does give a good glimpse on their Sample Hacks page, but let's do a quick work through ourselves.
The first chapter is called "Customizing the User Environment," and is probably best for end-users looking to go beyond their first steps. But it does include some useful hacks, such as "Use an Interactive Shell" that certainly fit well into the arsenal of any sysadmin, not to mention Hack #12 "Use Multiple Screens on One Terminal."
The second chapter, "Dealing with Files and Filesystems" also contains gems for both end-users and sysadmins. The use of mtree, which maps a directory hierarchy, is mentioned as a tool for recovery. Later on in chapter 6, Dru details its use for making a hacked data integrity checker, thus filling the role often played by products such as Tripwire.
Another great tool Dru covers in the second chapter is g4u, a free ghosting program that gives you the ability to perform quick restores over ftp. Ghosting a drive image is an incredibly useful tool, whether it's about replicating servers or doing a quick reinstall and configuration when a server fails in an emergency.
Chapter 3 is entitled "Boot and Login Environments." It gives some hacks that aren't just for basic system administration, but also some useful security ones including changing your /etc/passwd file to Blowfish encryption and utilizing OPIE for one-time passwords, which is built into FreeBSD.
"Backup Up" is the focus of Chapter 4. It includes some very creative methods of dealing with maintaining that necessity, and also includes an excellent primer on Bacula, which is increasingly gaining prominence as a cross-platform backup system.
Chapter 5 covers "Network Hacks," and continues on educating a sysadmin. Included in this chapter is the tcpdump program, a vital tool for watching traffic flowing by your network interfaces.
There's a strong security focus in Chapter 6, entitled "Securing the System." While security hacks are sprinkled generously throughout the book, this chapter works with firewalling with IPF and PF, in addition to covering SSH and Snort. It also includes the earlier mentioned 'intrusion detection-lite' approach with mtree.
Chapter 7, "Going Beyond the Basics" explores scripting, analyzing dreaded buffer overflows and more. Dru also includes a bit on "Creating a Trade Show Demo," not something you'd expect documented in print anywhere, but nevertheless quite useful for anyone working for the BSDs at a conference.
Dru continues with "Keeping Up-to-Date" in Chapter 8, which includes useful details on upgrading and downgrading your installed ports.
The final chapter is "Grokking BSD." "Grok," as Dru comments, refers to the science fiction writer Heinlein's Martian phrase for having a "thorough understanding." Dru covers creating your own manual pages, dealing with custom patches, playing with dictionaries and more.
Certainly there are no walls between each chapter, as many of the hacks could be shifted around. All the more reason to work your way through the book from beginning to end.
One useful addition for this book could have been somehow denoting which of the BSDs (in some cases, it's all of them) to which each listed hack can be applied. Certainly not all are available to Darwin and Apple's OS X. And certainly there's no point in making the OpenBSD /etc/passwd file encrypted in Blowfish, since that is its default.
While many of the hacks are found somewhere in the manual pages, on some useful website, buried in another book or in the minds of some developer somewhere, they're not necessarily in the annals of official documentation. But there's no single book or site that provides the depth and breadth that Dru provides. She managed to tap into the thoughts of dozens of developers and sysadmins around the world, greatly enhancing the variety of hacks in this book.
As a side note, the scope of BSD Hacks isn't limited to just the BSD family. Many of these are likely applicable to Linux and the other UNIX systems. But with recent, impressive increases in the BSD install base, there's a good chance that you can access a BSD box somewhere.
Whether you're a sysadmin managing hundreds of servers, or a power user ready to go beyond the obvious, BSD Hacks belongs next to your CRT.
You can purchase BSD Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Recent Past (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, those are much easier to review than those that arrive in the recent future.
FYI, the word you are looking for is "recently".
HTH
Oh my! (Score:1, Funny)
10 replies and all of them at -1 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~GillBates0 | Last Journal: Tuesday July 10, @04:36PM)
I can hear the sound of a million BSD-is-dying trolls banging on their keyboards.
Legitimate question. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday February 18 2005, @03:11PM)
Re:Legitimate question. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday June 29 2005, @09:39PM)
Re:Legitimate question. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://shortcircuit.us/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @02:01AM)
They have books on both Linux and BSD here [oreilly.com]. And, so long as you have a machine to read them from, check out their Safari service. I loved it. (but had to cancel to pay for tuition last Fall. I'm still planning on going back.)
Re:Legitimate question. (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday July 09 2004, @03:58AM)
Don't misunderstand -- "Linux hacks" is an awesome book, but it is a book that helps users that have some experience solve a couple of (or more like 100) special problems you really have to experience before you even know they exist. I don't know if this makes any sense, but what I'm trying to say is that it may be more suited for experienced users.
Since you seem to be an OS X user I think you'd get more help from another O'Reilly book: Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther [oreilly.com]. It teaches you the basics and might even get you far enough to experience the kind of situations where you'd start wanting a Hacks book.
Re:Legitimate question. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://wgz.org/chromatic/)
The goal of a Hacks book is much different from a Cookbook. A Cookbook will cover everything common you'll eventually want to do. A Hack will cover things you may never have known you want to do, but will want to do after you read them.
(I edited this book, so that was my goal at least.)
Awesome hack. (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/ [apple.com]
Secure architectures (Score:5, Informative)
(http://tradesims.com/mystery.html | Last Journal: Tuesday March 22 2005, @05:56AM)
Click on the Mystery Futures Link [tradesims.com]!
Alive and well (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ganjablogger.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 05 2006, @05:36PM)
Although BSD isn't commonly seen as an end platform in practice (with some notable exceptions), the code and technology in it are probably used in favorite OS no matter what OS that is.
So for once guys, be you linux fans, windows fans, or OS X fans, tip your hats. We should all be encouraging the growth and development of BSD.
About BSD-Hacks (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://m8d.de/)
There is no question. This book is useful and one of the best books that I've seen for a long time.
I'm using FreeBSD 4 and 5. That's why I like this book really much. It gives so many examples how to cope with shell settings, file systems, backups and many other typical problems. I have learned a lot from this book.
This here, is not the whole truth:
The majority of hacks are applicable to all the BSDs, including Darwin and OS X, although some are specific to one BSD or another.While reading this book you will find quite a lot passages saying: "For NetBSD, look at: http://...", "For OpenBSD, try: http://...", "Unfortunatelly, NetBSD..." or explaining NetBSD/OpenBSD features in one short paragraph and pointing to man-pages, while FreeBSD is explained with lots of details. I mean, this does not disturb me, but it might be annoying for other users.
*BSD as a Four Letter Word (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://myspace.com/bdetweiler | Last Journal: Sunday February 20 2005, @01:44PM)
Come on people, it's not like you pay for it! It's just as free as Linux! Each serve their purpose. Now, if you can't say anything positive, don't say anything at all.
The fight continues (Score:1, Funny)
(http://www.haydentech.com/deals.php)
Informative review (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday November 06 2004, @08:56PM)
Good documentation is considerably better.
It's good to see that the market is there for decent, affordable reference works for more than just Linux and Windows (though the latter is debatable... and that's not trolling, I have been a Windows admin for years and the thing that keeps me running Linux and *BSD baxes in my environments is that, as a rule, the documentation is a hell of a lot more affordable and accessible and generally better).
It is a shame that any BSD story on slashdot has to be inundated with the same tired "BSD is dead" trolls. Not that I am surprised to see trolling here, but get some creativity FFS (and that doesn't mean Fast Filesystem in this context).
You aren't even worth the mod points to flag you for what you really are, you sad, friendless twits.
Unix Power Tools (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.seekingfire.com/)
A comment I wrote for the Power Tools review applies to BSD Hacks as well:
Among the most hyperlinked book I've seen, this book is filled with hundreds of useful tips and, perhaps most interestingly, Unix culture. It's only marginally successful as a reference manual or as a teaching aid as it focuses on the useful-but-obscure aspects of Unix. Where it truly excels is in steeping the reader in ``How do I''-style Unix lore until it comes out of their pores.
website for QuickPatch and IPFilter scripts (Score:1)
(http://www.ecoms.com/)
His projects website is here at ROQ.COM [roq.com] and also has the very useful IPFilter script [roq.com].
As an aside, he said that in his bio in the book, OReilly credited him with different hacks than the ones he actually wrote... editorial snafu.
Another view on "BSD Hacks" (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.feyrer.de/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 16 2003, @07:49PM)
- Hubert
Secure Architectures with OpenBSD (Score:4, Informative)
I bought a copy of Secure Architectures with OpenBSD [amazon.com] and I think it is quite good, especially if you consider its relatively low price.
It's not that it cover every detail of every feature of OpenBSD, rather it many gives some background to them that the (ohh so excellent) man pages doesn't provide. For example: while the man page explain what rarpd does, the book admits that the service is quite archaic. :-)
I like it, and have learned a lot from it, even then I thought I knew most of it (or know where to look).
Doesn't look good... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday October 15, @11:53PM)
For instance, hack 100 tells you to copy the ~/.Xauthority file from user "dru" to root's home, then set DISPLAY. This is so root can display an X11 window...
The right way to do this is to:
A) use "xhost" as "dru". Specifically, "xhost +local:root" will give root access to the X server. If you're root, it's easy to su to dru, run xhost, then exit back to the root shell.
B) instead of exporting "DISPLAY" manually, it's best to just leave the "-l" off of SU, and inherent that variable automatically. Afterall, it could be DISPLAY=:19.0
Does it cover DragonFly BSD? (Score:1, Interesting)
*BSD literature/comparison for Linux admins? (Score:1)
(http://www.phuph.org)
Re:*BSD is dying (Score:3, Informative)
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article [internetnews.com], Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election. [freebsd.org]
You can read more about FreeBSD here [freebsd.org]
If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD [freebsd.org], OpenBSD [openbsd.org], NetBSD [netbsd.org], or DragonflyBSD [dragonflybsd.org]
Enjoy!
Re:FreeBSD vs Linux -- check it out (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://shortcircuit.us/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @02:01AM)
So they've found a new way to hide "BSD is dying" in their trolls?
Humanity is dying (Score:1, Funny)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Human community when IDC confirmed that Human market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all things on the net. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Humans has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Humanity is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Humanity's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Humanity faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Humanity because Humanity is dying. Things are looking very bad for Humans. As many of us are already aware, Humanity continues to lose market share. Blood flows like a river of red ink.
"Smart People"(tm) are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core reproducers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time people Stephen King and Feynman only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Humanity is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Human watchdog organisation BBC states that there are around 42,140 nuclear warheads poised to annihilate Humanity . How many People are there? Let's see. The number 6,382,978,111 was given by http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw. Therefore there are about 6,383,000,000 humans. Therefore there are about 6,400,000,000 people. A recent article put China's population at about 20 percent of the world population. Therefore there are about 1,261,832,482 chinnese people. This is consistent with the number of people in china.
Due to the troubles of world politics, abysmal birth rates in Japan and Italy, germ warfare, natural plauges, famine, and so on, people are largely screw. Now more people are dead, and with the death rate holding at a steady 100% there's little hope.
All major surveys show that Humans are pretty damn stupid. Humanity is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Humanity is to survive at all it will be through space travel. Earth continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Humanity is dead.
Fact: Humanity is dying