Jan-Piet Mens

It is high time that I show you the table of contents for the book Alternative DNS Servers so, without further ado, here it is:

1. Introduction to the DNS


2. How to represent zone data and where to store it


3. Preparing your implementation


4. MaraDNS


5. MyDNS


6. PowerDNS Authoritative Server


7. An overview of BIND


8. BIND's Simplified Database Interface


9. Bind DLZ


10. Name Server Daemon (NSD)


11. tinydns


12. ldapdns


13. dnsmasq


14. DNS on Microsoft Windows


15. DNS and Perl


16. DNS blacklists


17. Caching name servers


18. Delegation and private DNS roots


19. Updating DNS zones and their associated records


20. The Name Service Switch


21. Internationalized Domain Names


22. Introducing DNSSEC


23. Performance


24. Securing and monitoring your DNS servers

There are also six or seven appendixes (appendices), but as we haven't yet got their position in the ToC fixed yet, I'll omit them for the time being.

Publication date for the book is rapidly approaching: the deadline is July 15th, but I see no great problem with that. The manuscript has been ready for a while, and I'm now tweaking bits here, adding an index entry (or many) there, making sure diagrams look good, cropping the width of listings so that they fit the page, etc.

This weekend I added another 7 pages of content (cool and geeky stuff), because I want to bring the book up to the round (and I think, quite impressive) number of 730 pages. (The book is bound in signatures of 32 pages, so it will have 736 pages in total.)

I'll keep you updated.

You can start pre-ordering my upcoming book Alternative DNS Servers at
amazon.com
and at amazon.de.

I think you'll enjoy it.

Before starting on The Book of IMAP by Peer Heinlein and Peer Hartleben, you'd better have a very good understanding of e-mail, and I recommend you at least have some experience with IMAP, or you'll probably close the book after a few pages only.

I got the impression that the publisher dropped the original manuscript on the floor and upon gathering it up, they mixed up the order of the material. The book starts off with protocols and terms, moves into load distribution via load balancers, round robin DNS, IMAP proxies, selection of file systems for IMAP servers, Webmail clients and IMAP migration before starting on the IMAP servers proper! A beginner will find that very hard to follow and digest.

The book is full of valuable information on the Courier and Cyrus IMAP servers, and the authors have collected plenty of tips on those programs. However, there is little information about interaction with client programs and with e-mail servers, so if you've never set up an e-mail server with an IMAP (or POP3) server, I think it will be difficult to follow.

The (unofficial) Web site of The Book of IMAP has little additional information
(at the time of this writing), but that may change.

If you want to start with TeX and LaTeX on Mac OSX, I recommend the MacTeX Distribution, which supplies virtually all you need to start with in a single installer.

The bundle includes TeXShop a simple, yet practical GUI in which you write LaTeX and produce PDF at the click of a button.

Accessing WikiPedia is easy when you're online, but have you ever wanted to take it along with you for off-line situations? I have, and there is a lovely program to do so for Windows: WikiTaxi. You don't have to install the program; just extract it from its 7zip archive and put it in a convenient location somewhere on your Windows drive.

After downloading one of the page dumps from Wikimedia, you convert (to SQLite) the compressed page dump file (e.g. enwiki-.....-pages-articles.xml.bz2) to WikiTaxi's format with the included importer program, which takes a while: on my system the converter ran for just over an hour to translate the full WikiPedia compressed XML source (3.3GB) to WikiTaxi's format, resulting in a 5.89 GB file.

WikiTaxi is well documented, and it is fun to use. The only thing missing are WikiPedia's images, but those are difficult to acquire.

Congratulations to our friends at NLnet Labs for today's release of the Unbound name server.

Quoting myself from the press release:

We are very impressed with Unbound," said Jan-Piet Mens, author of the forthcoming book, "Alternative DNS Servers." "It is great code, very versatile, and it is the fastest caching server we tested."

If you need a caching and validating name server, get Unbound; it's worth your while (and I discuss it thoroughly in my book).

We've been given the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for my upcoming book, Alternative DNS Servers: the number is 978-0-9544529-9-5.

I've completed the last work on the appendixes (appendices); quite a long explanation of (Open)LDAP, including installation of Symas' offering, and a sexy little explanation on how you can use MySQL User Defined Functions to tweak your back-end DNS databases. (I believe many an administrator will enjoy that.)

The book is progressing very well. I'm currently working on the index. Parts of that are easy because I can automate them, others are more difficult.

I'll keep you posted.

O'Reilly has a new book: Wikipedia Reader's Guide. WTF? What's up next? A book on how to turn on the telly?

What really cracked me up, however, is what Customers interested in this book were also interested in.

(Hint: I mean the second book.) Quite contradictory, I'd say…