BSD

FreeBSD is the muscle behind companies like Netflix and EMC. Any place where someone does heavy lifting on the Internet, you’ll find FreeBSD. This newly revised edition of Absolute FreeBSD brings FreeBSD’s strengths to bear on your problems and covers FreeBSD's newest features, all in the inimitable style that has made author Michael W. Lucas' system administration books so popular.

Any computer system is only as good as the system administrator’s knowledge. Absolute FreeBSD teaches you everything you need to know about managing FreeBSD systems, from installation, configuration, and taking the system from “just working” to “working well.” A cohesive focus on service delivery and best practice means that you can apply much of the book to other operating systems.

Absolute FreeBSD dives deep into server management, taking you beyond just making things work and into understanding why they work.

You’ll learn:

• How to best install FreeBSD to meet your needs
• Which filesystem to use in your environment
• How to back up and restore critical data
• How to tweak the kernel, and when not to
• Network configuration, from activating interfaces to selecting congestion control algorithms
• How to manage UFS, ZFS, and other critical filesystems
• FreeBSD’s software packaging system, including how to build your own package repository
• How and when to upgrade
• Techniques to build your own FreeBSD
• Advanced security features like blacklistd and packet filtering
• How to monitor and adjust performance
• Container-style virtualization with jails
• Diskless systems
• Panic management and bug reporting

With Absolute FreeBSD you will get the solid introduction you need; and if you're a fan of the earlier editions, you will expand your skills even further.

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 enjoyed for years. You'll learn the intricacies of the platform, the technical details behind certain design decisions, and best practices, with bits of humor sprinkled throughout. This edition has been completely updated for OpenBSD 5.3, including new coverage of OpenBSD's boot system, security features like W^X and ProPolice, and advanced networking techniques.

You'll learn how to:

• Manage network traffic with VLANs, trunks, IPv6, and the PF packet filter
• Make software management quick and effective using the ports and packages system
• Give users only the access they need with groups, sudo, and chroots
• Configure OpenBSD's secure implementations of SNMP, DHCP, NTP, hardware sensors, and more
• Customize the installation and upgrade processes for your network and hardware, or build a custom OpenBSD release Whether you're a new user looking for a complete introduction to OpenBSD or an experienced sysadmin looking for a refresher, Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition will give you everything you need to master the intricacies of the world's most secure operating system.

For more than twenty years, serious C programmers have relied on one book for practical, in-depth knowledge of the programming interfaces that drive the UNIX and Linux kernels: W. Richard Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment. Now, once again, Rich’s colleague Steve Rago has thoroughly updated this classic work. The new third edition supports today’s leading platforms, reflects new technical advances and best practices, and aligns with Version 4 of the Single UNIX Specification.

Steve carefully retains the spirit and approach that have made this book so valuable. Building on Rich’s pioneering work, he begins with files, directories, and processes, carefully laying the groundwork for more advanced techniques, such as signal handling and terminal I/O. He also thoroughly covers threads and multithreaded programming, and socket-based IPC.

This edition covers more than seventy new interfaces, including POSIX asynchronous I/O, spin locks, barriers, and POSIX semaphores. Most obsolete interfaces have been removed, except for a few that are ubiquitous. Nearly all examples have been tested on four modern platforms: Solaris 10, Mac OS X version 10.6.8 (Darwin 10.8.0), FreeBSD 8.0, and Ubuntu version 12.04 (based on Linux 3.2).

As in previous editions, you’ll learn through examples, including more than ten thousand lines of downloadable, ISO C source code. More than four hundred system calls and functions are demonstrated with concise, complete programs that clearly illustrate their usage, arguments, and return values. To tie together what you’ve learned, the book presents several chapter-length case studies, each reflecting contemporary environments.

Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment has helped generations of programmers write code with exceptional power, performance, and reliability. Now updated for today’s systems, this third edition will be even more valuable.

The GNU Autotools make it easy for developers to create software that is portable across many Unix-like operating systems, and even Windows. Although the Autotools are used by thousands of open source software packages, they have a notoriously steep learning curve.

Autotools is the first book to offer programmers a tutorial-based guide to the GNU build system. Author John Calcote begins with an overview of high-level concepts and a hands-on tour of the philosophy and design of the Autotools. He then tackles more advanced details, like using the M4 macro processor with Autoconf, extending the framework provided by Automake, and building Java and C# sources. He concludes with solutions to frequent problems encountered by Autotools users.

This thoroughly revised second edition has been updated to cover the latest versions of the Autotools. It includes five new chapters on topics like pkg-config, unit and integration testing with Autotest, internationalizing with GNU tools, the portability of gnulib, and using the Autotools with Windows. As with the first edition, you'll focus on two projects: Jupiter, a simple “Hello, world!” program, and FLAIM, an existing, complex open source effort containing four separate but interdependent projects. Follow along as the author takes Jupiter’s build system from a basic makefile to a full-fledged Autotools project, and then as he converts the FLAIM projects from complex, hand-coded makefiles to the powerful and flexible GNU build system.

Learn how to:

• Master the Autotools build system to maximize your software’s portability
• Generate Autoconf configuration scripts to simplify the compilation process
• Produce portable makefiles with Automake
• Build cross-platform software libraries with Libtool
• Write your own Autoconf macros

This detailed introduction to the GNU Autotools is indispensable for developers and programmers looking to gain a deeper understanding of this complex suite of tools. Stop fighting against the system and make sense of it all with the second edition of Autotools!

OpenBSD’s stateful packet filter, PF, is the heart of the OpenBSD firewall. With more and more services placing high demands on bandwidth and an increasingly hostile Internet environment, no sysadmin can afford to be without PF expertise.

The third edition of The Book of PF covers the most up-to-date developments in PF, including new content on IPv6, dual stack configurations, the “queues and priorities” traffic-shaping system, NAT and redirection, wireless networking, spam fighting, failover provisioning, logging, and more.

You’ll also learn how to:

• Create rule sets for all kinds of network traffic, whether crossing a simple LAN, hiding behind NAT, traversing DMZs, or spanning bridges or wider networks
• Set up wireless networks with access points, and lock them down using authpf and special access restrictions
• Maximize flexibility and service availability via CARP, relayd, and redirection
• Build adaptive firewalls to proactively defend against attackers and spammers
• Harness OpenBSD’s latest traffic-shaping system to keep your network responsive, and convert your existing ALTQ configurations to the new system
• Stay in control of your traffic with monitoring and visualization tools (including NetFlow)

The Book of PF is the essential guide to building a secure network with PF. With a little effort and this book, you’ll be well prepared to unlock PF’s full potential.

"This book left me totally impressed at the breadth of capabilities offered by PF...I can recommend it to anyone with an interest (professional or otherwise) in network management." —Computing Reviews

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.

Kong's 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!

Device drivers make it possible for your software to communicate with your hardware, and because every operating system has specific requirements, driver writing is nontrivial. When developing for FreeBSD, you've probably had to scour the Internet and dig through the kernel sources to figure out how to write the drivers you need. Thankfully, that stops now. In FreeBSD Device Drivers, Joseph Kong will teach you how to master everything from the basics of building and running loadable kernel modules to more complicated topics like thread synchronization. After a crash course in the different FreeBSD driver frameworks, extensive tutorial sections dissect real-world drivers like the parallel port printer driver.

You'll learn:

• All about Newbus, the infrastructure used by FreeBSD to manage the hardware devices on your system
• How to work with ISA, PCI, USB, and other buses
• The best ways to control and communicate with the hardware devices from user space
• How to use Direct Memory Access (DMA) for maximum system performance
• The inner workings of the virtual null modem terminal driver, the USB printer driver, the Intel PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver, and other important drivers
• How to use Common Access Method (CAM) to manage host bus adapters (HBAs)

Concise descriptions and extensive annotations walk you through the many code examples. Don't waste time searching man pages or digging through the kernel sources to figure out how to make that arcane bit of hardware work with your system. FreeBSD Device Drivers gives you the framework that you need to write any driver you want, now.

GNU make is the most widely used build automation tool, but it can be challenging to master and its terse language can be tough to parse for even experienced programmers. Those who run into difficulties face a long, involved struggle, often leaving unsolved problems behind and GNU make's vast potential untapped.

The GNU Make Book demystifies GNU make and shows you how to use its best features. You'll find a fast, thorough rundown of the basics of variables, rules, targets, and makefiles. Learn how to fix wastefully long build times and other common problems, and gain insight into more advanced capabilities, such as complex pattern rules. With this utterly pragmatic manual and cookbook, you'll make rapid progress toward becoming a more effective user.

You'll also learn how to:

• Master user-defined functions, variables, and path handling
• Weigh the pitfalls and advantages of GNU make parallelization
• Handle automatic dependency generation, rebuilding, and non-recursive make
• Modify the GNU make source and take advantage of the GNU Make Standard Library
• Create makefile assertions and debug makefiles

GNU make is known for being tricky to use, but it doesn't have to be. If you’re looking for a deeper understanding of this indispensable tool, you'll find The GNU Make Book to be an indispensable guide.

sed & awk describes two text processing programs that are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox.sed is a "stream editor" for editing streams of text that might be too large to edit as a single file, or that might be generated on the fly as part of a larger data processing step. The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another.awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are interested in and the operations to be performed when that data is found. awk does many things for you, including automatically opening and closing data files, reading records, breaking the records up into fields, and counting the records. While awk provides the features of most conventional programming languages, it also includes some unconventional features, such as extended regular expression matching and associative arrays. sed & awk describes both programs in detail and includes a chapter of example sed and awk scripts.This edition covers features of sed and awk that are mandated by the POSIX standard. This most notably affects awk, where POSIX standardized a new variable, CONVFMT, and new functions, toupper() and tolower(). The CONVFMT variable specifies the conversion format to use when converting numbers to strings (awk used to use OFMT for this purpose). The toupper() and tolower() functions each take a (presumably mixed case) string argument and return a new version of the string with all letters translated to the corresponding case.In addition, this edition covers GNU sed, newly available since the first edition. It also updates the first edition coverage of Bell Labs nawk and GNU awk (gawk), covers mawk, an additional freely available implementation of awk, and briefly discusses three commercial versions of awk, MKS awk, Thompson Automation awk (tawk), and Videosoft (VSAwk).