BSD Hacks

100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

Reviewed by Major Keary

This book, BSD Hacks, covers a number of BSD variants (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Darwin) and is relevant to any other BSD-flavoured operating system.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD have increasingly gained traction in educational institutions, nonprofit organisations, and enterprises worldwide because they provide significant security advantages over Linux.

Best known as BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution sometimes appears in a Linux context, but is a Unix variant that can be installed on a desktop computer; an example of the association with Linux is its inclusion in listings at www.DistroWatch.com, which monitors the 350+ Linux distributions.

There is not much BSD literature about, which makes this title in the O'Reilly hacks series an important resource. It contains "100 industrial-strength tips and tools" from some twenty-six contributors.

The hacks are grouped in chapters that each cover a particular topic. For example, a chapter, Securing the System contains fourteen security-related hacks. The first of those shows how to strip the kernel to bare-bones essentials; not only does that improve performance, but removes vulnerabilities. The hack runs to about ten pages of detailed instructions and commentary. Most of the hacks are more concise than that, but where extra information is required there is no skimping.

Other chapter headings include: Customising the User Interface; Dealing with Files and Filesystems; The Boot and Login Environments; and Networking Hacks. This is a treasure trove of solutions and a remarkable resource for improving one's understanding of BSD in particular and Unix in general. Disaster recovery, hardware failures, use Microsoft Share facilities, automated backups, and security issues are all the subject of the book's hacks. Great value.

Dru Lavigne: BSD Hacks
ISBN 0-596-00679-9
Published by O'Reilly, 427 pp., RRP $49.95 incl. GST