© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen
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 2025, to help run the conference and to give this year's Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset tutorial, with my co-presenters Max Stucchi and Tom Smyth.
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. The most recent edition, the third, is available from here and from other good book sources.
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 again there is a PF tutorial, Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset, which is likely to follow the format from the previous years.
The format of the session is a sequence of short, intensive lectures interspersed with lab excercises. You can get a reasonable idea of what to expect by looking at the slides from the last sesssion. It can be worth noting that future updated versions of the slides will be available in the same location.
But we're still weeks away from the session, and we are in the period of time when we are making revisions and adjustments. So this is a good time to tell us what topics you would like to see us cover in the next session.
If you have one or more questions or suggestions, please do send them on to us at questions@pftutorial.net, preferably after taking a peek at the slides from the last sesssion.
We will consider each carefully, and if your question or suggestion turns into a new or changed topic, we will give credit where credit is due.
We are looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa in June!
Check out the BSDCan 2025 site for more information on the conference.
If you are unable to attend BSDCan, all is not lost: the EuroBSDcon 2025 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, your submissions will be welcome at the EuroBSDcon submissions system, where the deadline is 2025-06-21, or June 21st, 2025 (full disclosure: I'm on the program committee). This year's conference is set in beautiful Zagreb, Croatia in late September.
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