The seminal text on SSH, newly revised and updated!Secure Shell (SSH) lets sysadmins securely manage remote systems. It’s powerful, complicated, and confusing.Lose the confusion.SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels and Keys rescues you from sifting through decades of obsolete online tutorials and quickly makes you an SSH journeyman. You’ll learn toeliminate passwordsmanage access by users, groups, addresses,...

Let me be perfectly clear: ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor. If you don’t know ed, you’re not a sysadmin. You're a mere dabbler. A dilettante. Deficient.Forty years after ed’s introduction, internationally acclaimed author Michael W Lucas has finally unlocked the mysteries of ed for everyone. With Ed Mastery, you too can become a proper sysadmin.Ed Mastery will help you:• understand buffers and addresses• insert, remove, and mangle text• master fi...

“I think we’re gonna need a bigger web server.”OpenBSD has a solid reputation for security and stability. It’s well known for the OpenSMTPd mail server, the LibreSSL cryptography library, and the PF packet filter. But nobody ever talks about the load balancer, or the web server.Until now.The httpd web server provides a fast, stable, secure environment for your web applications. The relayd load balancer lets you distribute Internet application load across mu...

FreeBSD is one of the oldest and most featureful open-source Unix-like operating systems. FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials takes you on a deep dive into FreeBSD’s disk management systems.You’ll learn about:identifying your storage hardwarethe Common Access MethodGEOM–FreeBSD’s powerful and flexible stackable storage systemGUID Partition Tables, the modern disk partitioning standardMBR/disklabel partitioning, used by ...

Murder on the Sysadmin ExpressAfter accidentally solving two murders, Dale Whitehead hungers to stay in his apartment, hack virtual memory stacks, and forget the whole thing. Instead, his boss sends him to a technology/sci-fi convention in Detroit. He plans to endure his stint at the vendor table, stumble through his presentation, and escape anonymously.A dead body ruins everything.Dale finds himself battling liquid nitrogen ice cream, balk...

Not your normal Friday night in the computer room.Not a normal night anywhere.Terry is the archetypal old-school Unix admin, nurturing servers with care and precision while avoiding the latest trendy garbage. KDE and Gnome on a server? Nope, if you need a GUI use FVWM.The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init.So Systemd comes for Terry.Wearing skin-tight leather pants.No, not a normal night i...

SNMPSimple Network Management ProtocolFour lies in one acronym?It’s baroque. It’s arcane. And it’s everywhere.SNMP is one of those system management skills that people acquire by experience, stumbling through one horrid implementation after another and counting their knowledge by their scars. SNMP Mastery is your guide to the secret landscape of one of computing’s most mysterious tools.You will unde...

Become the Writer you Want to BeA hundred thousand gurus offer contradictory writing secrets. You must outline! You must free write! You must write at a standing desk with your bare feet in cold oatmeal!The gurus are all correct—and all wrong.In Domesticate Your Badgers: Become a Better Writer through Deliberate Practice, full-time author Michael W Lucas demonstrates how to build a personalized plan to transform yourself in...

What do the people of the post-scarcity future most value?Good sex.When everyone has nanotech implants to monitor their health and nervous system signals, how can you verify proof of ecstasy as the basis of money?Blockchain.Will Robert and Mallory’s first NookieCoin transaction go disastrously wrong? Or transform their lives for the better?(dystopian science fiction erotica)

Cisco routers and switches are the cornerstones of many networks. But when things break, repairs can intimidate even the most competent administrator. Luckily, just knowing the "in case of emergency" basics will take you far.Just like the original, this second edition of the highly acclaimed Cisco Routers for the Desperate is written for the administrator in crisis mode. Updated to cover switches and the latest Cisco terminology, with a tighter focus on the needs of the sm...

THE END OF YOUR WORLD?These twelve tales from critically-acclaimed author Michael Warren Lucas remind us that doom is always personal. Genes gone wild, or not wild enough. Cosmic heroes demanding you show them to a bank robbery, or else. Learning after a lifetime that your love is named chocolate, and chasing it no matter the cost. Discovering that your cozy desk job might get you killed, that one of your coworkers is a murderer, or the Faerie Queen wants your pelt...

You know that servers have log files and performance measuring tools and that traditional network devices have LEDs that blink when a port does something. You may have tools that tell you how busy an interface is, but mostly a network device is a black box. Network Flow Analysis opens that black box, demonstrating how to use industry-standard software and your existing hardware to assess, analyze, and debug your network.Unlike packet sniffers that require you to reproduce ...