A book in beta

Michael W. Lucas is working on a DNSSEC book that he’s self-publishing, similar to SSH Mastery.  He’s making an early draft available for purchase, at a discount.  You get access to the updates, so you effectively get the book for less, plus you can offer feedback before the publishing date.

This is a familiar concept for software, where early purchasers get access to a ‘beta’ version of software for testing…  It’ll be interesting to see how it works for a book.

A quick commercial anecdote for pfSense

Here’s an unsolicited testimonial for a BSD-based company.  My employer recently bought some of the assets of another company, in another state.  I showed up not sure exactly what I’d encounter, since the facility had never had anything better than out-of-state IT support via phone, and there had been very little time to plan.

The facility had 3 different network gateway devices from varying manufacturers, all old, and mostly dead.  The one working ancient Linksys small business gateway wasn’t physically able to work the way I wanted for extending our corporate network.  So, in a mild panic, I grabbed one of the defunct machines there and installed pfSense – a FreeBSD-based firewall/gateway solution, for those who aren’t familiar with it.   This is not unlike Michael W. Lucas’s BSD Origin Story.

It worked wonderfully.  It was very easy to configure.  I had exactly one problem: certain protocols like RDP would drop every few minutes.  I bought the basic support tier for pfSense – and had a working answer immediately.  Even with the support purchase, this has been cheaper and less work than purchasing the Cisco equipment my workplace normally uses.

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/13

It’s a very short week this week.  I was on the road for work, so I didn’t see anywhere as much of the Internet as I may have liked.  Count my dports writeup yesterday as part of this and it averages out to a good amount of reading.

  • Favorite Linux Commands.  Not all of them are Linux/bash specific.  (via)
  • Advanced Vim Registers.  Or buffers, or clipboards, if you want to get messy with terms.  (via)
  • “I hate BSD so much!”, he yelled at his spittle-flecked monitor.
  • TOME, a roguelike.  Read through the comments for discussion of many other roguelike games.

Your unrelated link of the week: New Tokyo Ondo.  via Jesse Moynihan, whose Forming comic on that site is an epic read.  Epic, as in it’s actually telling a NSFW world creation story.

Maintaining a wiki for fun

The Open Graphics Project, which is building a completely open video card, needs a wiki maintainer.  It’s a volunteer effort.  If you were perhaps thinking you wanted to step up to a more complex project but didn’t want to just be writing code, here is a perfect opportunity.

(Not too different from maintaining a project work blog, after all, and I know that’s rewarding.)

How to grind that axe, for donations

Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed.  The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math.  While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.

(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)