BSDCan Tutorials: Please Help Me Improve Your Experience

A good tutorial should sound to passersby much like an intense but amicable discussion between colleagues.

In a little over a month, I'll be heading out to Ottawa to attend BSDCan 2014. I've been a regular at BSDCan since 2006, attending every year since except 2008 -- I wanted to go that year too, but other business (actually the business of getting out of a company I'd helped build) kept blocking my preparations even though I had a fresh book out with the first edition of The Book of PF published late 2007.

Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.

But I've kept coming back after that, and I've almost always given the PF tutorial at BSDCan, this year I'm branching out a bit to give two separate sessions:

Note: While this piece refers to past events, some points may apply to upcoming events too.

Building the Network you need with PF, the OpenBSD Packet filter

and

Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5

Both sessions have been allocated 3 hour slots, and they also share another characteristic: I've invited my attendees to send me an email about what they're interested in learing during the tutorial. The main reason I do that is that I want to improve the experience for you, my prospective tutorial attendee.

Let me give you a bit of background. I've been giving the PF tutorial in various forms quite a few times over the years, and at one point I'd accumulated enough useful PF material that writing a book about PF seemed to be a natural next step. There was always some material that did not quite fit the book format, but a lot stayed at least for a while in my tutorial slides.

Over time I ran into a bit of trouble with the fact that BSDCan tutorials are always 'half day' or 3 hours. My collection of slides and notes have tended to expand over time, partly as a function of more experience, and partly due to the sad fact that the other BSDs have been slow to adopt any post-OpenBSD 4.5 syntax changes and other innovations. At some conferences and events I've done the PF session as a sometimes bit overfull full day event, depending on the number of questions and amount of other interaction.

But this time around it's three hours only, and I think that's quite an opportunity to improve the experience. I have more than enough material, but I've found that I usually know next to nothing about the people who will attend the sessions, and people's backgrounds vary enough that it's sometimes hard to find common ground or even pick out at short notice which parts of the material actually fits the group. I've had groups where some attendees had barely used any BSD at all along with OpenBSD developers who committed updates to man pages during the session in response to my slides and remarks, and most levels in between.

So with a strict limit on time, I would very much like to tailor the event specifically to the people who will be attending and who have something of an idea of what they want to learn. So please send me that email (to tutorial@bsdly.net), and I probably will end up updating the dense mass of slides anyway, and after the session they will be put in the usual place for browsing at your leisure.

If the format works, it's likely I'll try the short and tailored approach again at future events.

But there's more. As it says in the Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5 tutorial description, OpenBSD has been the source of a number of BSD innovations over the years, and OpenBSD 5.5 has several noteworty improvements: time_t is now a 64-bit value so time will not wrap anytime soon, we have a new traffic shaping system wrapped into PF and a clear path to replacing the once-experimental but now aging ALTQ, signify(1)-signed install sets and packages, and quite a few more bits. The relase page is filling out nicely at the moment.

It's likely that those changes alone cold be made to fill a 3 hour tutorial slot nicely, but once again I would very much like to shape the session to fit the needs of the people who are planning to attend, so it's likely that more general what to look out for when switching to OpenBSD style material will be useful too. And if you haven't already, your experience will be much improved if you prepare a bit. The OpenBSD FAQ and the website in general is a valuable resource, and Michael W. Lucas' Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd edition is a very good source of information.

This year's BSDCan will be the first time I do the Transition to OpenBSD N.m session (unless I do get a rehearsal run organized with some locals), but it's likely I'll try again at later events for whatever is the just released or soon to be released OpenBSD version. Things are shaping up nicely for OpenBSD 5.6 at the moment, but the details of that future release will be out of scope for the Ottawa session. So please do send me an email (to transition@bsdly.net) if you plan to attend the session, and I will do my best to tailor the tutorial to your needs.

For both sessions, my ambition is to have the tutorial sound like an intense, but amicable discussion among colleagues. I look forward to seeing you in Ottawa.

Update 29 April 2014: A few people have asked, and I answer: Even if you're not able to attend the BSDCan session, you're of course welcome to send me questions to indicate what you would like to see covered in the tutorials and in the slides I'll publish afterwards. I won't give a firm promise to cover every question, but I'm happy to hear from you.

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In other things, the manuscript for the third edition; of The Book of PF -- which main reason to exist is the new traffic shaping system -- is complete, going through the various editing steps and will be available at a yet to be determined date in 2014. I will be updating here and through twitter, G+ and other channels once more detailed information is available.

If you are unable to attend BSDCan, all is not lost: the EuroBSDCon 2014 conference is still accepting submissions for papers and tutorials, so if you have an interesting BSD-related topic you want the world to know about, please drop us a line (or even better a title, abstract and short biographical description) at submission@eurobsdcon.org (full disclosure: I'm on the program committee). This year's conference is set in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria in late September.