Somewhere in your organisation there is a server with more monitoring software on it than services to monitor. You have very likely met it. You may, with the best of intentions, have built it.
This book is about that server, and about the other sort: the one that upgrades itself before lunch and is never mentioned in a meeting again.
It is called Integrated by Design. It went on sale on 23 April, World Book Day, and from 23 September it can be ordered at almost any bookshop in the Western world. Give them thirteen digits, and a few days later you walk out considerably better informed than you walked in.
What it does for you
It takes the eight jobs a systems administrator does every week, from containers and upgrades to firewalls and documentation, and does each of them twice: first on an assembled Linux system, where every piece arrives from a different project on its own schedule, and then on FreeBSD, where the kernel and its manual pages leave the same source tree on the same day. By the fourth chapter you will see the pattern coming, which is rather the point.
Then it puts the argument down and hands you a terminal. Seven chapters take an empty disk to a production server, including a web stack spread across three jails in which only the front door has a network connection at all. A second customer arrives in about five minutes. Docker Desktop is replaced by 190 lines of shell you can read over a cup of tea, and the whole estate is monitored with tools that were in the box from the start.
Every command in it has been run on FreeBSD 15, and every configuration file is printed in full, never a fragment followed by the cheerful assurance that the rest is left as an exercise. Exercises, the author feels, are for textbooks.
Who will get the most from it
Anyone who runs Linux for a living and has begun to suspect, perhaps quietly, that it need not be quite this complicated. And anyone who already runs FreeBSD and has never quite managed to explain why to a colleague over lunch. The first will find a migration guide waiting at the back. For the second there is ammunition on nearly every page.
It treats Linux as the considerable achievement it is, and it is candid about where FreeBSD falls short. It makes no pretence of being neutral.
Where to find it
Ask at any bookshop in the international trade:
Paperback ISBN 978-3-9828652-1-8
Hardcover ISBN 978-3-9828652-0-1Both editions run to 371 pages in full colour. Where the law permits, a number of booksellers are currently offering it at a promotional price, some of them well below the list price, and one would be ill-advised to leave that sort of thing lying about for long. There is a Kindle edition as well, and a personalised PDF that only the publisher sells.
Fewer moving parts. Rather more weekends.