The Book of PF, 4th edition
109 points
6 hours ago
| 5 comments
| nostarch.com
| HN
INTPenis
3 hours ago
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It's a great book, I used to have some edition of it and it helped me a lot professionally with setting up firewalls, load balancing, traffic shaping and more.

I also had a book on Designing FreeBSD rootkits that was very educational.

Unfortunately I've given away all my books for more minimalistic living where I am instead dependent on digital information. Not sure how to feel about it.

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antics9
3 hours ago
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There are e-readers and DRM-free electronic libraries.
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iyn
3 hours ago
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What's everyone's experience with modern PF in production? Also, not to start a holy war, but what people think about modern PF vs nftables? I've only ever used nftables (and only in fairly simple scenarios) but I've always been curious about the PF side of the world.
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mono442
2 hours ago
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It's slower than nftables.
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touisteur
1 hour ago
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Not to ask anyone for free work but any write-up on this, I'd love to read.
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flipped
1 hour ago
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https://toni.cunyat.net/2019/11/nftables-vs-pf-ipv4-filterin.... According to this article, it depends on usecase.
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dhruv3006
4 hours ago
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Lot of admiration for no starch - your books are great !
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pss314
4 hours ago
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Per Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (as announced in one of the recent BSD conferences), No Starch Press will be publishing the third edition of the Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System book sometime later this year.
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assimpleaspossi
40 minutes ago
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I was just wondering about this the other day. I own both previous versions.
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xqb64
4 hours ago
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Yeah. My favorite are books that guide you through implementing complex systems projects from scratch, like Nora Sandler's "Writing a C compiler", or Sy Brand's "Building a Debugger". I wish they produced A LOT more of them.
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iberator
4 hours ago
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Those are some new and very very shallow books. There better one's from 90" and 80".
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cultofmetatron
2 hours ago
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much like swimming, it helps to start in the shallow end before you tread into deeper waters.
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eager_learner
3 hours ago
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care to name a few such good oldies?
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HackerThemAll
1 hour ago
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goku12
3 hours ago
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I buy ebooks straight from publishers like Nostarch and Leanpub. (In fact, I have an older edition of this book). There are a few books that are sold directly by the authors too. All of them DRM-free.

I actively avoid publishers and sellers who don't respect me as a consumer/reader. People need to start demanding better deals, or else we'll end up with monopolies that won't think twice about deleting books in your custody that you purchased from them.

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notamario
2 hours ago
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Yarr, that do be a problem matie.

In all seriousness, how has DRM not yet been recognized as the failure it is?

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globular-toast
4 hours ago
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I wish I had more of them. I maintain a modest library made out of real paper and I'm so glad No Starch still has good quality paper and excellent binding. I have a few of the more recent print on demand O'Reilly books but they feel more like cheap print outs I could have done myself. Unfortunately they are just so expensive so I do have to be very selective.
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skywal_l
3 hours ago
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PF = Packet Filter
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promiseofbeans
3 hours ago
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Was thinking I had missed an entire edition of Pathfinder for a moment upon reading the title
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replooda
3 hours ago
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Your comment made me one day younger.
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gspr
3 hours ago
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I'd love something similarly scoped centered around nftables. Does anyone have a suggestion? I see No Starch has a Linux Firewall book, but it's from 2008 and is thus iptables-based.
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flipped
1 hour ago
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Nftables has a really good doc site https://wiki.nftables.org/wiki-nftables/index.php/Main_Page. I wouldn't rely on any book
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