Michael W Lucas: 23 books

This updated edition of Michael W. Lucas' definitive volume on FreeBSD-based systems adds coverage of modern disks, the ZFS filesystem IPv6, redesigned jail and packaging systems, and virtualization, among dozens of new features added in the last 10 years. FreeBSD is the muscle behind companies...

“I’m glad someone’s finally giving ed the attention it deserves.” – Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix 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...

OpenBSD, the elegant, highly secure Unix-like operating system, is widely used as the basis for critical DNS servers, routers, firewalls, and more. This long-awaited second edition of Absolute OpenBSD maintains author Michael Lucas's trademark straightforward and practical approach that readers have...

Online Backup you can Trust and Verify! Tarsnap, the secure online backup service for Unix-like systems, raised the bar for online backups. It’s inexpensive. It’s reliable. And you don’t need to trust the Tarsnap service—they can’t access your backups even if they wanted to. With...

21st-Century Data Storage ZFS, the fast, flexible, self-healing filesystem, revolutionized data storage. Leveraging ZFS changes everything about managing FreeBSD systems. With FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, you’ll learn to: understand how your hardware affects ZFS arrange your storage for optimal...

Stop waiting for the network team! If basic TCP/IP was hard, network administrators couldn’t do it. Servers give sysadmins a incredible visibility into the network—once they know how to unlock it. Most sysadmins don’t need to understand window scaling, or the differences between...

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 hardware the Common Access Method GEOM–FreeBSD’s...

Filesystems for every need! FreeBSD includes many special-purpose filesystems. FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems takes you through these filesystems, helping you solve problems you didn’t know you have. These filesystems underlie everything from application servers to jails. With...

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...

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...