[nycbug-talk] some comments, please

[G.Rosamond]

i'm posting this to slashdot book reviews. . .comments appreciated. . 
.some rewriting from the soon-to-be-released Daemon News EZine version. 
. .



A flurry of BSD UNIX-related (Berkeley Software Distribution) books 
have hit the bookstores over the past few years.

 From books specific to OpenBSD (Secure Architectures with OpenBSD) to 
the reissue of The Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating 
System for FreeBSD 5.x expected in August 2004, to Michael Lucas' 
series of BSD Books from NoStarch Press, print documentation is 
certainly available for those interested in learning about the free, 
open source UNIX system which powers operations such as Yahoo! portal 
and Sendmail.org website, Verio and Pair hosting, not the mention 
Netcraft, the premier web server survey site.

Dru Lavigne's BSD Hacks (O'Reilly and Associates, May 2004), is the 
latest book in these releases, and is an enormously useful resource for 
systems administrators and end-users alike.

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. For those who find difficulty in BSD installs and other 
fundamentals, it's best to start with the FreeBSD Handbook, the NetBSD 
Guide or the OpenBSD FAQ.

It's not just for sysadmins though. Intermediate and advanced BSD users 
will also find the book an excellent tool.

There's lots of good hacks buried in the various BSD books, around the 
internet in different how-to's and tutorials. But BSD hacking is the 
sole purpose of BSD Hacks. 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 gap 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 for 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 light version with mtree.

Chapter 7, "Going Beyond the Basics" explores scripting, analyzing 
dreaded buffer overflows and more. She also includes a bit on "Creating 
a Trade Show Demo," not something you'd expect documented in print 
anywhere, but nevertheless something that is 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's 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, or all, the hacks were appropriate to. Certainly not 
all are available to Darwin and Apple's OS X, without at least further 
knowledge of hacking port source code.

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, but not necessarily in the annals of official 
documentation.

There's no single book or site that provides the depth and breadth that 
Dru provides.

It's a project that no one individual is capable of doing. Dru managed 
to tap into the thoughts of dozens of developers and sysadmins around 
the world, greatly enhancing the variety of hacks in this book.

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.

Spend a weekend working through this book. You won't regret it.