On 2017-04-07 16:41, Mihai Popescu wrote:
I don;t want to offend you folks, but I'm curious and I will ask: is
this BSDCon so useful? Does it pay the efforts?
If someone has time and knowledge to do a PF tutorial he/she can do it
and post. Do you need the Con?
I'm asking this having in my mind Google Summer of (no)Code thread from
misc@.
Again, i'm asking, i've never been to a Con to sense the feeling.
Thanks.
I'll take a stab at this...
* BSDCan (not Con) is cheap. Stupidly cheap, in fact: $195/person if
you're paying your own way.
* The PF tutorial is not free - there is an additional cost ($75) to
attend the tutorial.
* Peter clearly has the time and knowledge to do it, he has huge amounts
of raw material on his website, including what amounts to last year's
tutorial slides, for free - but also chooses to deliver this tutorial.
Based on the fee, the number of attendees, and the number of presenters,
no-one's getting rich off this.
* The tutorial is a focused, half-day session where you get to interact
with the top PF trainer in the world, and ask the questions specific to
your network.
* Peter keeps his tutorial up to date, unlike most if not all of the
resources you'll find online, some of which predate the change in syntax
from several years ago.
You've asked almost the same question as "why does anyone need
tutorials? just read the man pages!" just at the next level up. The
answer is because the man pages aren't adequate to cover every scenario,
and not everyone can read man pages effectively. People have different
learning styles, if nothing else. I learn best by seeing examples and
asking questions. (In fact, the lack of good examples is a pet peeve of
mine with the OpenBSD man pages, but that's another story.)
I've attended Peter's seminar two?, maybe three? times now, and got
something new out of it each time - some nuance that wasn't obvious just
from reading pf.conf(5). Sometimes it was something Peter said,
sometimes it was something another attendee said. That's the value of
attending any training class or seminar, not just this one for PF.
The tutorial is aimed not at people who would go and produce another
tutorial, but at ordinary system administrators who don't have time to
pore over the entire manpage, who want the most relevant information to
them distilled and delivered efficiently.
Plus, this year it appears that Peter is co-delivering the seminar with
Massimiliano Stucchi from RIPE, so it will presumably cover a lot of
IPv6 topics as well, which are poorly represented in existing materials
and yet increasingly relevant.
Disclaimer: I now help organize (one small) part of BSDCan & PgCon, so
I'm not *entirely* unbiased, but this is pretty much what I would have
said the first two years I attended, anyway.
-Adam
