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The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
It seems that the main purpose of the book is to describe how FreeBSD can be integrated into current network structures that include Microsoft clients and servers -- a very useful idea. The author describes step by step how this can be done, and in which particular situations.
Mittelstaedt places an emphasis on using SSH instead of telnet between machines, security layout, using BSD for firewalling, print serving, and even file serving using Samba. Overall, this book makes a very good tutorial for all of the above. He spends a good deal of the first quarter of the book helping new users through the installation process in order to get a functional FreeBSD machine.
When the book originally came into my hands, it was on the last proof. Some of the things I pointed out couldn't be changed before the print date. Although some people might disagree with me, there were several things which I thought would either date the book and/or were unnecessary.
The first issue was the misnaming of PHP in the book. Ted called it the "Perl Hypertext Preprocessor," but PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Pages." It has since been renamed "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor," in a "GNU's Not UNIX" fashion. The author conceded that neither Perl nor PHP advocates would be very happy with this, and agreed to include it in the book's errata on its Web site. As of this review, the change to the errata still hasn't been made.
The second issue is that the book may become quickly outdated. Because the book is so specific about technical issues such as installation, etc., it may become dated before the next revision. This means it will likely have little use to those who may want to install FreeBSD 5.0 next year.
The last issue, and probably the one of biggest contention, is the last part of the book: more specifically, the last five or so pages. The author does a good job throughout the book describing how one could implement FreeBSD in a corporate environment, coexisting rather peacefully with Microsoft software, only to go on what I call a five-page, well thought-out rant on Microsoft's bad consumer policies and the horrible quality of its software.
While we may all agree, I don't particularly think this is the way to win people over to the Good Side of the Source. Personally, I believe in the "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" approach, and I feel that those last five pages tear down everything the author had worked for in the first 380. I believe this leads to rabid OS advocates who end up doing more harm than good. For more thoughts on this, Wes Peters makes a good case for temperate advocacy in the January 2001 issue of Daemon News.
Still, the book is good overall, and I would recommend it to those needing a quick primer on how to get FreeBSD working in an existing environment, with the caveats I've mentioned.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
If you want help try freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org and freebsd-questions@freebsd.org. The latter has a high noise to signal ratio, hackers is bettter but tends to get you a few replies like "RTFM asshole."
Has it ever occured to you that these "rafts of links to mailing list archives, HOWTOs, message board posts, etc" are a side effect of insufficient documentation? What would you prefer, some gossip on the mailing list, some step by step guide that may or may not work in your case or precise authoritative documentation to help you understand how to do whatever it is you want to do and warn you of any possible consequences? I'd take the latter any day of the week.
It seems to me that many Linux users, especially those that have been using it for a long time like you did, picked up this nasty habbit of hitting the search engines first instead of reading the proper documentation, probably because documentation on most linux distributions is rather poor. In the case of the FreeBSD you have the excelent manual pages documenting nearly anything you can imagine (including drivers, configuration files and misc information like ports(7) for example) and on top of that the handbook and the FAQ. If you still can't find an answer, you can search the questions mailing list, if you find nothing, you can ASK a question.
How do you use VESA modes with the console? read the manual page of the console driver of course, syscons(4), which points you to the direction of vidcontrol(1) among other things, that explains what you have to do.
How do you optimize your UDMA drive performance? Well, first of all you don't have to - I never found an disk/controller combination that was set incorrectly by FreeBSD. While the kernel boots up the transfer mode of all drives is clearly indicated, ie:
ad0: 42934MB <WDC WD450AA> [87233/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33
If you want to change it, you check on the manual page of the respective driver, in this case ata(4) where you will find that there is a sysctl knob to tweak them should you really have to. Which you won't.
As for newbies being frustrated, I rather doubt it. The handbook explains rather well how to go about looking for answers in the (excellent) manual pages, and after a couple of times one gets used to it. What IS really frustrating is having to rely on mailing list archive gossip that might offer information that is old or does not apply.
This review says very little about the book itself. The majority of it is about the reviewer's disagreements with the author. After reading it, I still don't know whether it would be useful for, say, an administrator, a developer, or just curious about FreeBSD.
How about listing the table of contents, or describing which areas are covered in how much depth, are there any examples with source, are the examples accurate, and so on.
My meta-review: this review is (-1, uninformative)!