Tilted Windmill Press: 37 books

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

He fell asleep a successful forty-six year and woke in his parents’ ramshackle home, decades earlier -- eighteen years old again, with alcoholic parents and a violent brother. A chance for a better life? Or just another trip through the nightmare? Sometimes, knowing then what you know now doesn’t help.