A BSD Miscellany

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Dru Lavigne
Aug. 04, 2004 01:03 PM
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It's been a hectic summer for me--it seems I haven't had a chance to stop long enough to put together all of the cool items I've come across. So brace yourself for a hodge-podge of mostly BSD related miscellany.

EuroBSDCon has listed this year's talk schedule:

http://2004.eurobsdcon.org/talkschedule.html

It looks like a good line-up for both talks and tutorials. I just hope I won't be too nervous when my turn arrives...

NYCBUG is revamping their website to include a lot of useful content:

http://dev.nycbug.org/

Note that this is still under development. The old web site is still available at:

http://www.nycbug.org

NYCBUG is a very active and supportive user group, so much so that their mailing list includes users (including myself) which are geographically located far from the Big Apple. I am definitely looking forward to the Kirk McKusick meeting on October 16th. It will also be my first trip to the Big Apple and should get me all geared up for Karlsruhe, Germany.

Speaking of user groups,

http://www.bsdusergroups.org/

has been revamped. If your group isn't already listed, take advantage of the "Add your Group" link. I also recommend that user groups sign up for the O'Reilly user group program:

http://ug.oreilly.com/

in order to take advantage of the newsletters, free review books, and book discounts.

For those who have been patiently waiting, the BSD Success Stories pamphlets are soon going to be a reality. I did discover that summertime isn't the best time to ask for something to be published--way too many people go on holidays and tech conferences. In the meantime, the rest of the 13 stories will be posted to:

http://advocacy.daemonnews.org/

Give it a day or so for the stories to filter their way past the moderator.

Have you had a chance yet to see the new advocacy site at Daemonnews? It has the makings of becoming a good reference. I don't know about you, but Daemonnews is one of my daily Internet stops.

A second reader wrote me a few weeks ago about hack #82 from BSD Hacks. As it turned out, it was used as part of a series of articles he was writing on his adventures setting up an embedded system using FreeBSD. With his permission, here are the articles he has so far, with more to come:

http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/embedded/stories/bdgFreeBSDEmbedded.html

Since I originally wrote hack #82 last winter, I've re-hacked it using an alternative method. I wrote it up as part of the next FreeBSD Basics article which should publish August 26th.

Finally, I received my copy of Richard Bejtlich's "Tao of Network Security Monitoring" and am trying to sneak in a bit of reading as I can:

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321246772/qid%3D1091647962/701-5151931-4537144

I've mentioned before that Richard's blog (http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/) is another one of my daily Internet stops as he combines my two favourite subjects: FreeBSD and security. So far, I'm really enjoying the book and appreciate Richard's logical, thorough approach and the plethora of useful URLs to additional references interspersed on nearly every page. His discussion on "accessing traffic in each zone" is very practical and definitely written by someone who has "been there done that". And within the first 100 pages I've already come across undocumented or poorly documented BSD commands which Richard explains in detail.

My only caution to readers is that they'll enjoy the book a lot more if they bring to it a fairly solid understanding of networking, TCP/IP, and general security concepts. After all, this is an Addison Wesley, not a "teach yourself network monitoring in 24 hours". I do think that those with the networking and security background will appreciate the level of experience Richard has brought to the book. And, this point can't be championed enough: this book was written to demonstrate how open source tools on open source operating systems are ideal for network monitoring.

Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, author and international speaker. She has over a decade of experience administering and teaching Netware, Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint, SCO, Solaris, Linux, and BSD systems. A prolific author, she pens the popular FreeBSD Basics column for O'Reilly and is author of BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD Basics.

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