Peter N. M. Hansteen Long rumored and eagerly anticipated by some, the fourth edition of The Book of PF is now available for preorder This week it was finally time to announce, to the fediverse and to mailing lists, that there is a new edition of The Book of PF in the works, and preordering is now enabled. Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here. A few questions immediately pop into readers' minds on hearing this news. The ones I get most often are, Why now? What took you so long? which quite frequently combines with What changed? Are previous editions now useless? I'll address both after repeating what I said in the email announcements: The fourth edition was written to bring the text into sync with the realities of the modern Internet, seen from the perspective of someone working with OpenBSD 7.8 or FreeBSD 14-STABLE. The structure and chapter titles will be recognizable to readers of the previous edition, with the content updated to reflect the realities of the modern Internet. What happened was, for quite some time after the third edition was finished, there were essentially no user visible changes such as syntax changes in the configuration for OpenBSD PF. The code was definitely being worked on, developers fixed bugs, introduced optimizations such as network stack wide improvements in multicore support. But user-visible changes other than likely performance improvements did not appear, so I saw no urgent need to make updates to the book. During the years following the late 2014 publication of third edition, I went on giving talks and tutorials, and at some point I welcomed input and help from my present co-presenters of the Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset tutorials, Max Stucchi and Tom Smyth. Over a few revisions, the tutorial sessions became ever more OpenBSD centered, possibly because we were all focusing more on that system than the others. And of course, over time we made tweaks to the ...
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