Michael Lucas: 81 books

If Agatha Christie ran Unix Conventions The BSD North conference draws some of the smartest people in the world. These few days will validate Dale Whitehead’s work—or expose him as a fraud. When a tragic death devastates the conference, only Dale suspects murder. Computer geeks care about code. But do they care enough… to kill?

Duplicate. Infiltrate. Exterminate. Liberate? The alien ate its way out of Antarctica, devouring and duplicating every living thing it found. Humanity turned continents to glass and oceans to poison in a desperate effort to stop it—and failed. Nobody expected that once the alien...

BEYOND CIVILIZATION Antarctica? Uganda? No place so nice. This crew of Internet professionals, summoned to the isolated Oregon Coast to design a new Web application, find themselves WITHOUT WIFI Then things go bad. Like, dead body bad…

Midnight at the datacenter. Crimping cable, testing circuits, and— —dodging bullets? Toby just wants to finish tonight’s install and go home, but gunfire and spilled blood mean he might never go home again. But one gunman turns into a team. Hostages. And stakes higher than...

Pluggable Authentication Modules: Threat or Menace? PAM is one of the most misunderstood parts of systems administration. Many sysadmins live with authentication problems rather than risk making them worse. PAM’s very nature makes it unlike any other Unix access control system. If...

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...

Unix-like operating systems have a primitive access control system. The root account can do anything. Other users are peasants with only minimal system access. This worked fine in UNIX’s youth, but today, system administration responsibilities are spread among many people and applications. Each...

ZFS improves everything about systems administration. Once you peek under the hood, though, ZFS’ bewildering array of knobs and tunables can overwhelm anyone. ZFS experts can make their servers zing—and now you can, too, with FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. This small book teaches you to: ...

“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...

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,...

DNS is one of the oldest protocols on the Internet, and was designed for a network without hostile users. Anyone who wants to break into a network starts by investigating the target's Domain Name Service. DNS Security Extensions, or DNSSEC, hardens DNS and brings it into the 21st century. But learning...

CONFINE YOUR SOFTWARE Jails are FreeBSD’s most legendary feature: known to be powerful, tricky to master, and cloaked in decades of dubious lore. Deploying jails calls upon every sysadmin skill you have, and more—but unleashing lightweight virtualization is so worth it. FreeBSD Mastery:...

While domestic issues loom large in voters' minds during American presidential elections, matters of foreign policy have consistently shaped candidates and their campaigns. From the start of World War II through the collapse of the Soviet Union, presidential hopefuls needed to be perceived as credible...

Völlig neue Welten und das lockende Unbekannte. Eine unstillbare Neugier treibt zahlreiche Schriftsteller seit Jules Verne dazu, technische Innovationen aufzugreifen, die fesselnde Frage nach Leben auf fremden Planeten zu stellen und über interstellare Transportmöglichkeiten zu spekulieren. Dabei...