Top all-time · #2121
Michael W Lucas
Personal blog · mwl.io/archivessystemswritingprogramming
Michael W Lucas's personal blog at mwl.io covers systems, writing and programming. Since 2018, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “The Print Book Trade, and Money”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 14 of 33 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael W Lucas's site for his technical books on PAM, Ed, TLS, email, networking and BSD, plus fiction and posts on BSD, ZFS and DNS. Commenters recommend the books.
- Recommended for · 14 comments
- Books called helpful, indispensable, readable and entertaining; a nice DNS piece; a straight forward ZFS intro.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 33 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /nonfiction/tools4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-05-26
- The Print Book Trade, and Money3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-04-10
- /archives/23632 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-15
- /fiction2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-26
- /nonfiction/tools2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-06
- TLS Mastery2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-10
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-21
- Networking for Systems Administrators2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-18
- /nonfiction/os2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-26
- /nonfiction/tools2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-31
What Hacker News says?
FreeBSD has an analogous mechanism called etcupdate[1]. I think Boot Environments[2] are pretty similar to SilerBlue but I don't know how BEs manage /etc. [1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=etcupdate [2] https://mwl.io/archives/2363
Comment linking /archives/2363
on “Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac”Submitted Vultr Just Betrayed Us as a story · 189 points
HN discussionOn a slightly related note, Michael W. Lucas[1] is working on an upcoming book entitled "Run Your Own Mail Server", that will be published shortly (there's a Kickstarter campaign as well[2]). I attended his tutorial and talk at BSDCan[3] this year and both were excellent. I highly recommend buying the book when it comes out (or supporting the Kickstarter), it will go through all the gory details of setting up and ru…
Comment linking /
on “Understanding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: A Simple Guide”Submitted Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable as a story · 188 points
HN discussionMichael W. Lucas would probably agree: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39697206-ed-mastery * https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed
Comment linking /nonfiction/tools
on “Let's Settle This”Submitted TLS Mastery as a story · 152 points
HN discussionI think i read somewhere that Michal is working on a 3rd edition, maybe ask for a free/cheap digital upgrade if you buy the 2nd ed? https://mwl.io/
Comment linking /
on “OpenBSD 7.2”Submitted The Print Book Trade, and Money as a story · 84 points
HN discussionFWIW: No Starch Press has a book about PF. I haven’t read it myself, but it might be worth having a look at. https://mwl.io/archives/2232
Comment linking /archives/2232
on “Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-time”Submitted When to Buy Your Own ISBNs as a story · 73 points
HN discussionOf course, there is Ed Mastery by Michael W. Lucas: https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed that you can read in an afternoon easily. It helps you understand some UNIX history, explains why stuff works the way it works and you can have a good laugh at that.
Comment linking /nonfiction/tools
on “Exiting VIM is hard; sometimes we need to take drastic measures”Submitted Run Your Own Mail Server Funded as a story · 38 points
HN discussionThe scenario reminds me of this story: https://mwl.io/archives/605
Comment linking /archives/605
on “One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions”Submitted Why "Run Your Own Mail Server" Is Not in Amazon's Kindle Store as a story · 17 points
HN discussionHe was also an early NetBSD developer -- proff@netbsd.org https://mwl.io/archives/443
Comment linking /archives/443
on “Julian Assange contributed to PostgreSQL”Submitted OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI have created a script, that mimics most of the modern CA and intermediate CA infrastructure for testing HTTPS/ Content Security Policy and more at OrgPad, where I work. TLS Mastery by Michael W Lucas https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking#tls helped me a lot. Having an internal CA is a lot of work, if you want to do it properly and not just for some testing. It is still rather hard to setup HTTPS properly without re…
Comment linking /nonfiction/networking
on “Should you use Let's Encrypt for internal hostnames?”Submitted The Cat as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> It is sort of sad but BSD is bad at publishing news and tutorials. Say what? https://www.freebsdnews.com/ http://undeadly.org/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/ https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os https://nostarch.com/catalog/linux-bsd-unix https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/
Comment linking /nonfiction/os
on “From macOS to FreeBSD”Submitted The Print Book Trade, and Money as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe reluctance towards moving to git in the FreeBSD community actually provided the central theme in the book "git commit murder": https://mwl.io/archives/2913
Comment linking /archives/2913
on “FreeBSD src repository is transitioning from Subversion to Git this weekend”Submitted Building Mastodon Bots Is Stupid Easy as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMichael Lucas wrote up a nice piece about setting up an Unbound DNS Server on OpenBSD eight years ago.[0] It might need some updating, but probably you could do that by reading the man page.[1] [0] https://mwl.io/archives/580 [1] https://man.openbsd.org/unbound.conf
Comment linking /archives/580
on “Paul Vixie thinks more people should be running their own DNS servers”Submitted Run Your Own Mail Server as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't have much experience with stunnel, but I have used sshuttle and SSH SOCKS proxy/ tunneling, SSHFS and other tricks quite a bit also for work. I have done SSH over Tor as a hidden service but I haven't played with obfsproxy just yet. Some people made tunnels (including SSH) over DNS, which can be handy as well. This is probably just enough to check HN, read email and SSH/ Mosh to somewhere to fix something wh…
Comment linking /nonfiction/tools
on “VPN over SSH? The Socks Proxy”Submitted Why My Web Store Uses Bookfunnel as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI suspect there is but I dont know about it (I use SmartOS / Triton). There is a small list of jail management tools [1]. If it doesnt exist it should be really easy to make since FreeBSD jails (usually) sit on ZFS you can easily use "ZFS send" to create a image of the ZFS dataset. All that one would need to add is some (minor) tooling. On the more "heavy side" I know that for example Project Fifo has experimental F…
Comment linking /archives/2291
on “FreeBSD 12.1”Submitted Michael W Lucas: Good-Bye Twitter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlso worth checking out Michael W Lucas' books: * https://mwl.io/nonfiction I've heard (but not read) good things about his fictional works as well, e.g., $ git commit murder : * https://mwl.io/fiction/crime#gcm * https://mwl.io/fiction
Comment linking /fiction
on “Yes, the Book of PF, fourth edition is coming soon”Submitted Why Mastodon/the Fediverse kind of sucks right as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
