© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen
A collection of pointers to things I have written and that I think may be of value to you too, my fellow geek friend
I was recently (late May of 2025) asked to provide a list of things I have written over the years that would be suited to offer useful insights to someone not familiar with my work or the field(s) I cover.
In addition to the book I wrote and have revised when the time seemed right, I have written the odd blog post over the years, and this is the list I came up with, in roughly reverse chronological order:
Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.
For Upcoming PF Tutorials, We Welcome Your Questions (2025) -- I have been giving PF tutorials for about 20 years, for the last few years in cooperations with Max Stucchi and Tom Smyth. This piece was written to encourage questions and other input while we are preparing for the BSDCan 2025 session, which we are still working on preparing as I write. However, we always welcome your input and we have provided contact information in the piece itself. Also available tracked, prettified.
No Project Is an Island: Why You Need SBOMs and Dependency Management (2025) -- This piece is really about software engineering coming to grips with what real world engineering is all about. The world, or parts of it, finally decided that we could no longer consider software "just a bit of typing", and we are answering the challenge by leveraging lessons learned by working on free software. A further evolved version could turn up at future public events. Also available tracked, prettified.
A Suitably Bizarre Start of the Year 2025 (2025) -- Because, well, the time around the start of the year showed up a few truly bizarre things, a surge in truly nonsensical spamming activity being one item. The number of imaginary friends collected has kept up the pace, see links in the piece itself for up to date information. Also available tracked, prettified.
You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now For The Daily Tasks. (2024) -- I am much indebted to Solène Rapenne for pointing out to me that two earlier pieces I had written about life with OpenBSD were, while not actually wrong, just quite a bit out of date. This piece recitifies that situation, and provides some basic advice for day to day life with our favorite operating system. Also available tracked, prettified.
Three Minimalist spamd Configurations for Your Spam Fighting Needs (With Bonus Points at the End) (2024) -- Fresh off writing his excellent mail server book, Michael W. Lucas posted a thing on the Mailop list that had me write a short piece on domain-only trapping (linked in this one), and after a quick think, also this piece that offers other minimalist but actually usual configurations. Also available tracked, prettified.
The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting ... Imaginary Friends? (2022) -- A follow-up to an earlier piece on the embarrasment-based extortion spamming campaigns we had been seeing for some years. This piece makes a hopefully clearer case than the previous one that the potentially embarrasing video material the messages claim exist most likely does not. After all, multiple thousands of addresses that have been known to never have existed are targets of these campaigns, swelling temporarily the list of greytrapped hosts. Also available tracked, prettified.
A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools (2022) -- The good people at SEMIBUG asked me to give a PF talk for one of their user group meetings. This is the writeup for that talk, with links to slides and other material. Very much colored by my tastes, but hopefully useful. Also available tracked, prettified.
Badness, Enumerated by Robots (2018) -- Way back when, I started setting my systems to collecting IP addresses that were the source of undesirable activity and publishing updated lists at intervals. That activity stayed useful for longer than I had anticipated, and at some point I wrote this summary of what those systems do, with references to other resources, of course. Also available tracked, prettified.
Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord - On The Cheap With OpenBSD, pflow And nfsen (2014) -- "Have you ever wanted to know what's really going on in your network? Some free tools with surprising origins can help you to an almost frightening degree.". Yes, with tools that are either part of OpenBSD or within easy reach via the package system, you only need to put in rather modest efforts to reveal deep truths about the life on your network. Also available tracked, prettified.
Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures - Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools (2014) -- Originally a BSDCan paper from the late noughties, with emphasis on the exploit mitigation techniques in OpenBSD and how to leverage them in the effort to limit or even get rid of spam and malware. Even after all those years, some aspects of this text are still quite relevant. This piece has seen occasional updates as indicated by the copyright line. Also available tracked, prettified.
The Hail Mary Cloud And The Lessons Learned (2013) -- The Hail Mary Cloud was a widely distributed, low intensity password guessing botnet that targeted Secure Shell (ssh) servers on the public Internet. The first activity may have been as early as 2007, but our first recorded data start in late 2008. This summary article describes the botnet activities and countermeasures as well as offering some more forward-looking statements about Internet security. Also available tracked, prettified.
Those, I said to my correspondent, are likely the more interesting entries.
If you have read this far and found something useful or enlightening by visiting the linked items, that will make me happy to have turned some Sunday afternoon procrastination into something useful to others. And I have this to offer as a bonus for your perseverance:
I have also been a guest blogger at blog.apnic.net:
What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (2021) in three parts, starting with What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 1: How it all started (also the original in one piece, What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (tracked, prettified), and
A few of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (2022) also ran as a two part series at APNIC, starting with A few of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (part 1) and A few more of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools (part 2)
Upcoming events:
Ottawa, Canada: BSDCan 2025 has tutorials June 11-12, 2025 and talks June 13-14. A new version of Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset will go ahead there.
A little later on in 2025, 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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