Absolute BSD: The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD (Paperback)

~ (Author), Jordan Hubbard (Author) "Before you can learn to run FreeBSD, you need to install it..." (more)
Key Phrases: make buildworld, cvsup mirror, nobody httpd, Apache Web, Cancel Figure, Red Hat Linux (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a practical how-to guide for managing FreeBSD." -- SOUTHPOINT.com

"...a very fine piece of work." -- LOGIN: THE MAGAZINE FOR USENIX AND SAGE

"Great content. Easy to understand. This is a great first book on BSD -- TECHWEEK TV

"Highly practical, and deliberately written to be accessible to users of all skill and experience levels..." -- THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

"packed with a lot of information." -- DAEMON NEWS

Product Description

Absolute BSD focuses on FreeBSD's features, benefits, and strengths - specifically on using BSD systems as high-performance Internet servers. Designed for new system administrators with basic UNIX knowledge who want to accomplish essential tasks with the FreeBSD operating system, the book's main focus is on FreeBSD, but much of its information is also applicable to OpenBSD and NetBSD. BSD-specific features are covered, such as how to build a high-performance server, secure it, prepare crash dumps, and interoperate with other network servers. A troubleshooting section that addresses problems that a new FreeBSD administrator might encounter is also included.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 616 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1886411743
• ISBN-13: 978-1886411746
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #340,899 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely a great book FreeBSD book -- for administrators, February 9, 2003

By	Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity.com" (Metro Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is the sort of book I've been waiting for, since reading Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD" almost one year ago. Michael Lucas is well-known for his articles, and his knowledge and easy conversational style shine in "Absolute BSD." Of the four books I've read with "FreeBSD" in the title, this has been the most helpful -- but not necessarily the most comprehensive.

The strength of "Absolute BSD" lies in Lucas' understanding of what matters most to system administrators. Control of services via scripts, bandwidth throttling, firewalls, networking health monitoring, SCSI, RAID, upgrades -- these are what UNIX sys admins care about. You'll learn the most if you follow along with Lucas' examples. I tweaked, tuned, and typed my way through kernel builds, mergemaster, IPFilter, jails, MRTG, and other processes and tools. Along the way I appreciated Lucas' attention to detail, like pointing out the subtleties of 'top -S', and his knowledge of obscure tools, like 'sockstat' or 'vmstat'.

"Absolute BSD" does have a few flaws, and I almost gave it four stars. I was sad to see no coverage of 'portupgrade' (though Lucas wrote about it in Nov 01) or using RSA/DSA authentication with OpenSSH. While his instructions for Apache were sufficient to get a basic installation running, I didn't feel BIND was covered adequately. I would trade the talk about these applications for more FreeBSD-specific material, like the excellent and unique chapters on "Making Your System Useful" (ch 10) and "System Performance" (ch 18). Beware errors in crontab entries (pp 190-1) and probably omissions in OpenSSL (pp 313-4). Overall, the quality of the material Lucas included in his book far outweighed my concerns. If you know anything about FreeBSD, it's that the developers of the volunteer project are almost too busy to document their work. Thank goodness Lucas -- a FreeBSD committer -- took the time to share what he knows!

"Absolute BSD" addresses topics not found in other FreeBSD or UNIX system administration books. It's a must-buy. If you want wider coverage, try "FreeBSD Unleashed." For integration with Windows, check out "The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide." For comparisons with other UNIX types, see "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." Beginners will still like Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD." I can't wait to read Lucas' upcoming OpenBSD book.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly helpful, February 5, 2003

By	Amanda Robinson (Lake Orion, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This book is by far the most useful and helpful book I've read for setting up a *NIX server (and as my husband and I have set up several dozen Linux boxes, a couple of SGIs, and an HP-UX machine, believe me when I say I've read several). The author uses a light, humorous and conversational tone throughout, making the book an easy read even for newbies, but that doesn't mean it's lacking in technical information-- just reading Chapter 9 (Too Much Information About /etc) is enough to make your head spin.

Mr. Lucas starts from the beginning with installing FreeBSD (a chapter that I admit I skipped at first, and I ended up reinstalling because of it), and goes all the way up through such non-trivial events as system panics and how to respond to them (unfortunately, most of the best options require some proactive configuring, so the bulk of the people who need the information will be unprepared. But that is hardly the author's fault). In between, he spends several chapters discussing how to secure your system, which is probably the single most important element to setting up any computer for any use, and also the most ignored.

The book is, admittedly, a little light in X11 and other desktop-machine elements (a mere 14 pages are devoted to the entire subject), and is more suited to those wishing to set up a server. It's evident, however, that the author has had a great deal of experience with setting up FreeBSD servers for a number of uses in a number of environments, as there's enough information in the book to set up your server as:

* An all-purpose Internet host

* A dedicated mail host

* A high performance web server

* A firewall

* A fileserver on a Microsoft network

* A backup server

* A nameserver

* A network-monitoring server

While it's highly unlikely that you would ever want a single server to do all of the above, the information is there for you to pick and choose what you need for your particular environment. And throughout it all, Michael Lucas keeps his irreverent yet easily understood tone.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For new SysAdmins or those who want to build a server, December 9, 2003

By	Amadan "amadanb" (NY) - See all my reviews

This is a book for people who want to use FreeBSD as a server -- for mail, web services, DNS, etc. It's not a book for those who want to use FreeBSD as a desktop machine. FreeBSD makes a perfectly good desktop OS, but Absolute BSD includes very little information about setting up X or installing and using desktop applications. If you want to try out FreeBSD as an alternative to your Linux desktop, look elsewhere. But if you want to build a server, and learn an awful lot of incredibly useful bits about basic systems administration tasks (much of which is applicable to any other *nix system, including Linux), then I haven't found a better book for this purpose.

I bought this book because I liked Lucas's more recent book, Absolute OpenBSD, so much, and he covers FreeBSD at least as well, if not better. His writing style is humorous and very readable while still conveying a lot of technical information, and you not only learn what you need to type on the command line to accomplish a particular task, but also how a SysAdmin thinks.

Being more familiar with Linux, only somewhat familiar with BSD in general, I have gone from chapter to chapter and this book has guided me through installing FreeBSD both from CDs and over the network, upgrading it, and recompiling a more optimized kernel (which turns out to be a fairly painless process, if you follow the instructions in this book, for those of you who believe, as I did, that recompiling kernels is a big hassle, messing with the guts of your machine and likely to kill it if you make one stupid mistake). He explains every configuration file, how to set up (or turn off!) services, how to make your machine secure, how to make it useful, how to install and upgrade new packages, and how to provide web, mail, and DNS services, and his instructions are very clear and makes it much easier to understand WHY you need to do certain things as well as what you should do. Someone who has never performed any of these tasks before should have no trouble doing so by following the instructions in this book, and afterwards you should know enough that with a little exploration you'd be able to do the same on another OS.

As the author says at the beginning, this book is actually meant to be read from start to finish, rather than being flipped through as a reference guide. What you learn in each chapter builds on the one before. Thus, this book might be somewhat less useful to experienced SysAdmins who just need to know BSD-specific information -- while the information is comprehensive enough to make it a good reference guide, there is probably a lot of extra space devoted to material that experienced SysAdmins already know. However, if you're a novice SysAdmin or just want to learn how to run your own server at home or a small one at work, I think Absolute BSD does a credible job of turning absolute novices into competent junior-level SysAdmins. So this is really a book about systems administration, not just FreeBSD, though the material is all aimed at running FreeBSD systems.

For its intended audience (novice or junior-level systems administrators or people who just want a web server) and scope (using FreeBSD as a server), this is an excellent book. There are other FreeBSD books out there, or more generic books about Systems Administration, with a wider scope, which might be more useful for other purposes. But I would still absolutely recommend including this book on your shelf if you are going to perform admin duties on any system (especially *nix systems), or use FreeBSD for any purpose.