BSD Books

Absolute FreeBSD: The Complete Guide to FreeBSD, 2nd Edition

Michael W. Lucas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

FreeBSD--the powerful, flexible, and free Unix-like operating system--is the preferred server for many enterprises. But it can be even trickier to use than either Unix or Linux, and harder still to master.

Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition is your complete guide to FreeBSD, written by FreeBSD committer Michael W. Lucas. Lucas considers this completely revised and rewritten second edition of his landmark work to be his best work ever; a true product of his love for FreeBSD and the support of the FreeBSD community. Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition covers installation, networking, security, network services, system performance, kernel tweaking, filesystems, SMP, upgrading, crash debugging, and much more, including coverage of how to:

• Use advanced security features like packet filtering, virtual machines, and host-based intrusion detection
• Build custom live FreeBSD CDs and bootable flash
• Manage network services and filesystems
• Use DNS and set up email, IMAP, web, and FTP services for both servers and clients
• Monitor your system with performance-testing and troubleshooting tools
• Run diskless systems
• Manage schedulers, remap shared libraries, and optimize your system for your hardware and your workload
• Build custom network appliances with embedded FreeBSD
• Implement redundant disks, even without special hardware
• Integrate FreeBSD-specific SNMP into your network management system.

Whether you're just getting started with FreeBSD or you've been using it for years, you'll find this book to be the definitive guide to FreeBSD that you've been waiting for.

Building a Server with FreeBSD 7

Bryan Hong

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The most difficult part of building a server with FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, is arguably software installation and configuration. Finding the software is easy enough; getting everything up and running is another thing entirely. The only option for many people has been to hire a consultant.

Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 is for those of us who prefer to build our own server. If you're a small business owner looking for a reliable email server, a curious Windows administrator, or if you just want to put that old computer in the closet to work, you'll learn how to get things up and running quickly. Then, once you have a working system, you can experiment, extend, and customize as you please.

You'll learn how to install FreeBSD, then how to install popular server applications with the ports collection. Each package is treated as an independent module, so you can dip into the book at any point to install just the packages you need, when you need them. The book s modules cover topics like:

• Running common FreeBSD admin commands and tasks
• Managing the FreeBSD ports collection
• Installing third-party apps like Apache, Courier-IMAP, SpamAssassin, CUPS, Cyrus SASL, MediaWiki, and WordPress
• Setting up MySQL, NTP, ISC DHCP, ISC BIND DNS, PHP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and OpenVPN

Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 will have you up and running fast, with minimum hassle. (Just be sure to send the money you save to the Unemployed Consultant Foundation.)

Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking

Joseph Kong

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Though rootkits have a fairly negative image, they can be used for both good and evil. Designing BSD Rootkits arms you with the knowledge you need to write offensive rootkits, to defend against malicious ones, and to explore the FreeBSD kernel and operating system in the process.

Organized as a tutorial, Designing BSD Rootkits will teach you the fundamentals of programming and developing rootkits under the FreeBSD operating system. Author Joseph Kong's goal is to make you smarter, not to teach you how to write exploits or launch attacks. You'll learn how to maintain root access long after gaining access to a computer and how to hack FreeBSD.

Kongs liberal use of examples assumes no prior kernel-hacking experience but doesn't water down the information. All code is thoroughly described and analyzed, and each chapter contains at least one real-world application.

Included:

The fundamentals of FreeBSD kernel module programming

Using call hooking to subvert the FreeBSD kernel

Directly manipulating the objects the kernel depends upon for its internal record-keeping

Patching kernel code resident in main memory; in other words, altering the kernel's logic while it's still running

How to defend against the attacks described

Hack the FreeBSD kernel for yourself!

BSD UNIX Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD

Christopher Negus, Francois Caen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

BSD Unix Toolbox, a Worthy Companion 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

The meat of this book, like it's Linux counterparts in the series (I read Ubuntu Linux Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for Ubuntu and Debian Power Users), lies in the useful shell commands that even seasoned administrators may have overlooked or useful combinations that never occurred to them. Personally I've used Linux since 1999 and have three or four years of professional administration on Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris. To my surprise I still found one or two new tricks in the Ubuntu book and quite a few more in the BSD book.

A junior administrator or a intermediate hobbyist will find countless pointers, commands, and insight that takes years of reading man pages, web searching, and chatting with other geeks to figure out. I know Francois Caen, one of the writers in this series, and his goal was to bring together all these "tools" he uses every day to accelerate your learning curve. I think he and Negus met that goal.

While I thought this book was good, it was missing a few things I expected to see. It's clearly focused on Linux users who want to put their toe in the BSD pool. That's pretty good for me, primarily a Linux user, but users not coming from a Linux background may be lead slightly astray. Special attention is paid to setting up a FreeBSD system that can play nicely with Linux systems (reading ext2/3 file systems, for example). I feel that the Linux compatibility received a bit too much coverage, but given the popularity of Linux, many will appreciate it.

The book is applicable to all BSD based systems, and even Linux and commercial Unix variants to a lesser extent, but it focuses on the popular FreeBSD variant. Personally I'm exploring OpenBSD for use as routers/firewalls, and I'd say about 80% of the BSD content in this book is applicable to OpenBSD (in my naive viewpoint). I really wished they would have covered the OpenBSD packet filter (PF) more, but with the focus on FreeBSD, IPF is covered instead. I was quite surprised at the easy to use syntax of IPF compared to IPChains in Linux.

As seems to be the trend with recent technical books, there were a couple typos in some of the examples, but a careful reader can catch the gist of what was meant.

All in all BSD Unix Toolbox is a great book for an intermediate Linux or Unix user interested in exploring the FreeBSD command line. I all but guarantee you will find a few new commands to add to your own toolbox.

Editorial Review:

0-24666-5 Developing Facebook applications requires a different way of thinking than traditional web site development. This book guides you through the process, covering topics and theory that can be applied immediately. The author begins with a look at the Facebook Platform and explores the basics. Next, the core components of the Facebook Platform are presented along with helpful examples. Youll learn how to extend and enhance the applications youve already built. This book arms you with the tools and know-how to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment. Chassaing/Digital Signal Processing 2e

The Best of FreeBSD Basics

Dru Lavigne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For over seven years, computer networking and security instructor and consultant, Dru Lavigne, meticulously documented her learning experiences with FreeBSD administration and open source software usage in a series of over 110 articles. Many readers praised and recommended the author's informative tutorials. The Best of FreeBSD Basics book contains most of these articles - updated to reflect the usage on FreeBSD 6.2. The Best of FreeBSD Basics provides practical advice for completing common tasks on FreeBSD and is a great way to get to know FreeBSD - and Unix in general. Darwin, DragonFly, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, and OpenBSD fans will also find a lot of the book invaluable and useful. Covering a huge range of FreeBSD and open source topics, The Best of FreeBSD Basics includes step-by-step directions, things to watch out for, and hints for success. A sampling of the book's topics include installing an X11 server and setting up a desktop environment, comparing common tasks with Linux, playing audio and video files, user administration, system startup, finding and using documentation, managing backups, networking basics, IPsec, setting up several servers, filtering spam, improving security, enabling firewalls, and a lot more.

The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD UNIX Operating System

Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, Quarterm, Samuel Leffler

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BSD Hacks

Dru Lavigne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the world of Unix operating systems, the various BSDs come with a long heritage of high-quality software and well-designed solutions, making them a favorite OS of a wide range of users. Among budget-minded users who adopted BSD early on to developers of some of today's largest Internet sites, the popularity of BSD systems continues to grow. If you use the BSD operating system, then you know that the secret of its success is not just in its price tag: practical, reliable, extraordinarily stable and flexible, BSD also offers plenty of fertile ground for creative, time-saving tweaks and tricks, and yes, even the chance to have some fun.

"Fun?" you ask. Perhaps "fun" wasn't covered in the manual that taught you to install BSD and administer it effectively. But BSD Hacks, the latest in O'Reilly's popular Hacks series, offers a unique set of practical tips, tricks, tools--and even fun--for administrators and power users of BSD systems.

BSD Hacks takes a creative approach to saving time and getting more done, with fewer resources. You'll take advantage of the tools and concepts that make the world's top Unix users more productive. Rather than spending hours with a dry technical document learning what switches go with a command, you'll learn concrete, practical uses for that command.

The book begins with hacks to customize the user environment. You'll learn how to be more productive in the command line, timesaving tips for setting user-defaults, how to automate long commands, and save long sessions for later review. Other hacks in the book are grouped in the following areas:

Customizing the User Environment

Dealing with Files and Filesystems

The Boot and Login Environments

Backing Up

Networking Hacks

Securing the System

Going Beyond the Basics

Keeping Up-to-Date

Grokking BSD

If you want more than your average BSD user--you want to explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on your own--BSD Hacks is a must-have. This book will turn regular users into power users and system administrators into super system administrators.

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

As in earlier Addison-Wesley books on the UNIX-based BSD operating system, Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil deliver here the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative technical information on the internal structure of open source FreeBSD. Readers involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; applications developers can learn effectively and efficiently how to interface to the system; system administrators can learn how to maintain, tune, and configure the system; and systems programmers can learn how to extend, enhance, and interface to the system. The authors provide a concise overview of FreeBSD's design and implementation. Then, while explaining key design decisions, they detail the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing the systems facilities. As a result, readers can use this book as both a practical reference and an in-depth study of a contemporary, portable, open source operating system.This book: *Details the many performance improvements in the virtual memory system *Describes the new symmetric multiprocessor support *Includes new sections on threads and their scheduling *Introduces the new jail facility to ease the hosting of multiple domains *Updates information on networking and interprocess communication Already widely used for Internet services and firewalls, high-availability servers, and general timesharing systems, the lean quality of FreeBSD also suits the growing area of embedded systems. Unlike Linux, FreeBSD does not require users to publicize any changes they make to the source code.

Absolute BSD: The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD

Michael Lucas, Jordan Hubbard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Recomended 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Buying a good book specific to FreeBSD is not a simple task.
There are dozens of books about FreeBSD but all of them are just some sort of copy of the HandBook.

This is really the first book that is different to almost all others publishied books -at least till today-.

I will recommend it to any one who is interested in having a deeper understandig (from a point of view of a SysAdmin, of course) of the system.

In fact, FreeBSD UNLEASHED, the Handbook, and Absolute BSD are 3 books that any FreeBSD SysAdmin should have.

By the way, its time for an updated version of this book, the Version 5 FreeBSD is out :)

Editorial Review:

FreeBSD is a powerful, flexible, and cost-effective UNIX-based operating system, and the preferred server platform for many enterprises. Includes coverage of installation, networking, add-on software, security, network services, system performance, kernel tweaking, file systems, SCSI & RAID configurations, SMP, upgrading, monitoring, crash debugging, BSD in the office, and emulating other OSs.

FreeBSD 6 Unleashed

Brian Tiemann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Because it's very popular among Internet service providers (ISPs), FreeBSD is likely the Unix flavor you work with when you Telnet into the server that hosts a Web site. For that reason, it's worth having FreeBSD Unleashed around if you frequently need to log in to various hosted environments but don't do your day-to-day work on a FreeBSD computer. If you're running FreeBSD on your own machine--and more than a few Linux critics say you should be--you'll get even more out of this book, particularly if you prefer to have your reference materials on paper. It's a good idea to have them that way when you're having problems getting FreeBSD to connect to the Internet, after all.

This book explains, succinctly, how to do basic utilitarian stuff like moving files and creating users, and advanced utilitarian stuff like "building the world" from raw source. Further, the authors explain Unix concepts (like the shell and its relationship to the kernel) clearly and in ample detail. Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann also go beyond FreeBSD itself, explaining such concepts as wide area networks (WANs) and basic, environment-neutral Perl programming. Whether these inclusions are valuable extras or extraneous padding depends upon your perspective, but there's no doubt that the authors maintain a high quality standard throughout their documentation of FreeBSD and its allied technologies. --David Wall

Topics covered: Using and enjoying the FreeBSD flavor of Unix, with emphasis on versions 4.4 and 5.0. Instructions and explanations--all rather detailed--appear on installing the operating system, configuring groups and users, setting up daemons (including those for network services like mail), and connecting to other computers (as well as the Internet). Installable copies of FreeBSD 4.4 and 5.0 ship with this book.