Comments about oreilly The Book of PF:

If you're looking for information about the OpenBSD packet filter program "pf", you may have noticed a gaping hole on bookstore shelves. Two books that I have read on pf are "Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, 2nd Edition" by Jacek Artymiak and the No Starch Press title, "The Book of PF", by Peter N.M. Hansteen.

"The Book of PF" is by far the easier of the two books to digest and will help you get up to speed very quickly. It's a short book, weighing in at 145 pages. The example rule sets are simple to follow and very thoroughly documented.

Hansteen helps you navigate through pf's basic configuration and then takes you through more advanced topics like wireless networks and how to deal with 'bigger or trickier networks'. There is also a treatment of OpenBSD's spamd program, designed to help you combat spam on your network.

You'll find a chapter on Alternate Queuing (ALTQ) and Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP). ALTQ provides a way to shape the traffic on your network and was integrated into pf for the OpenBSD 3.3 release. CARP was added to OpenBSD in release 3.5 to address the issue of high availability and uninterrupted service.

A chapter covering Logging, Monitoring, and Statistics helps bring it all together for the network administrator. Hansteen closes out the text with a chapter titled "Getting Your Setup Just Right" that provides a last-minute review of some of the most important configuration options.

If you're interested in "The Book of PF", most likely you're already familiar with OpenBSD - one of the most secure operating systems available today. If you're ready to enhance OpenBSD's default security, pick up a copy of this book and spend some time with the pf program.

Comments about oreilly The Book of PF:

Mr. Hansteen, Did a rather good job of putting this book together. The chapters flowed well and one led into the next in a very logical manner. I especially found useful the sections on Round-robin and setting up wireless (Chapter 4 and 7).

Although I make a business of building firewalls I will be keeping this book close at hand. Sadly I only gave 3 stars as I felt the editing could have been better I found several errors with the sample scripts and rules and found it lacking with one or two advanced areas for the professionals would have made this a 5 star easy.