Excellent OpenBSD book, well written and an easy read

books:


	• Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the Practical Paranoid Michael W. Lucas No Starch Press, 2003 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This might be the best OS guide ever written.

This book stands out as uniquely well conceived and written. It presents a wealth of useful information on OpenBSD in a style unmatched by nearly any computer/computing book I've seen. Mr. Lucas manages to avoid both obtuseness and superficiality and imparts his knowledge with wonderful ease and grace. This book should not leave anyone intimidated or insecure about running OpenBSD, and will likely prove very useful to users of other BSDs as well. With this book as its cornerstone, you can create a library of just four volumes - the others being BSD Hacks, and Unix Visual Quickstart Guide and Unix Advanced Visual Quickpro Guide - that you couldn't match in terms of concentrated usefulness for any other OS.

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Book for those who want to get started with OpenBSD

If you want to use the internet with minimal security risks, you want to use OpenBSD -- but there are aren't that many intro materials. Just getting a box set up, so that you can search the web for answers is tough. If you don't know someone who can help you, this book can get you through the tough spots; you just need will.

With this book, you can install the OS and get on the Web securely and quickly. Almost all your problems will not be with OpenBSD itself, but with your complicated DSL modem, ISP or sendmail.

There's very practical information in this book (e.g. IP aliasing -- good if you want hidden machines on your LAN) that isn't in more encyclopedic books. This is one of the best things about this book, the very high signal to noise ratio. If you want a reference for OpenBSD, try the FreeBSD books -- some are excellent, and they are similar enough to OpenBSD that you'll be able to get done what you need to get done. But read and re-read Lucas's book before you try new things.

The author didn't make clear that OpenBSD attempts to prevent failures proactively, even if it means you get cryptic and alarming warnings. Where other OS's silently accept or ignore potentially bad things (e.g. ARP cache poisoning), OpenBSD sounds the alarm. If you've simply misconfigured stuff, these warnings can scare you. Just look on the web for answers; others have made these same mistakes.

More details on how to recover from mistakes would have been nice. E.g. what to do if you suboptimally partition the disk, or what if you get the IP address wrong. You better know something about Unix beforehand. Notes on how to fix major problems (e.g. ruined fstab), or where to go for such info would be nice -- I wound up reinstalling/rebooting a few times, which I know is an admission of failure -- but I couldn't find out what else to do.

The author doesn't hype the correctness of OpenBSD enough, and the positive feelings you get over time due to this. The software really works as advertised. As you set things up, you get constant positive feedback, because stuff works and keeps on working. I've had no crashes after 7 months use.

The longer your stuff stays up and working, the more you see how rotten stuff is outside of BSD-land. Use OpenBSD and you'll experience some juicy schadenfreude as you learn of the woes of the non-BSD users. If you look at your computer's logs, you'll see that you are getting scanned all the time by compromised windows and linux boxes. You can justifiably feel superior to these people; they chose the wrong OS and pay the price. You chose the right OS (for a hostile internet) and have to pay the price every day, because administering an old-school Unix box is not as easy. The author doesn't make these points, perhaps because they are a bit mean-spirited, and he's a nice guy.

Finaly, the author has some cool articles online at Onlamp, of a decidedly "hacker" nature -- e.g. setting up embedded OpenBSD on diskless machines. Now you see why this book has so much practical info; the author does a lot of hacking. I want a book on that stuff, from this author.

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Excellent OpenBSD book, well written and an easy read

If you know anything about Unix/Linux then you will love this book. I have found it hard to put this book down and would recomend it to anyone looking to move/use OpenBSD. This book is written for those who are probably new to BSD OS's and have some Linux/Unix experience. I would say that someone new to the *nix enviroment will learn a great deal from this book as well, but having some background will help greatly. A must read from cover to cover. I even read the Intro and I never do that. Cheers to the author and thank you for all the help. "Newbies please read before you post"

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great for users familiar with Linux/BSD

Just reading the Absolute OpenBSD book really isn't enough to learn a lot of the aspects of the OpenBSD operating system, but the book definitely gives you a great reference and information to fall back on when learning how to use OpenBSD or learning something new about it. For me it really wasn't the learning the feel of Linux/BSD that gave me some trouble in OpenBSD since being familiar with Slackware Linux helps out for learning the feel, but it was mainly just some of the major differences between them such as PF vs. IPTables for example. This book helped me get past the learning curve of starting the OpenBSD, and in the end the servers of mine running the OS seen an improvement all around in getting things done. I doubt by just reading this book that a user could know OpenBSD inside and out without prior GNU/Linux or BSD familiarization, but the book does a good job at going over the OpenBSD operating system and it's security features/advantages along with going into detail about just about anything pertaining to this extremely secure and locked down operating system, also will allow even veteran OpenBSD users to possibly learn something new.

The last great thing about this book is that it's fairly up to date, but did leave one thing out that I would have liked to seen in the book; the CARP system that is new since OpenBSD 3.5. But I guess since CARP just came around since 3.5, it's understandable that it wasn't really covered in this book. All in all I would recommend this book to anybody with GNU/Linux or BSD experience and looking to expand their knowledge into OpenBSD, but for newer users of this type of system I would recommend also seeking more information from the OpenBSD manual pages or have a OpenBSD machine on hand for trying things while you read through the book.

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This book + the OpenBSD FAQ is all you need to start

I am a Sys Admin with 7 years UNIX experience (Solaris 2.6-9, DG-UX, SCO Unixware/Openserver, Red Hat Linux4-Ent3, Nokia IPSO) and have started to move into the BSD realm over the last year. I have always had an interest in OpenBSD because of the security first attitude and I started using FreeBSD on several servers last year.

Now I find myself with several sparc64 machines with nothing to do. Looking over my network, I see that I can use a bridge with pf enabled in a couple of places as well as a Load Balancer or two. So in comes OpenBSD.

This book was a pleasure to read and reference while getting the OpenBSD boxen in line. It covers the basics of installing, upgrading, patching, and other Sys Admin tasks. It also has three chapters on pf (the firewall for openbsd) which is a major strength of this os.
It was a great intro and fun read (my wife thinks I am disturbed for reading it at the pool :-), while then turning to the OpenBSD FAQ for more insight.

I have become a rabid fan of OpenBSD and see it having a larger role in future deployments of mine.
If you are new to OpenBSD with some Unix-type background, this is the book you need to get started with little fuss.

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