An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember ClosedBSD? Guess what? Now there is a bootable CDROM version available. Check it out here. In case you forgot, ClosedBSD is powerful firewall distribution based on the FreeBSD kernel. Best of all: It is free software that can be distributed under the terms of the BSD license. Definately worth checking out."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

LiquidPC writes: "Lance M. Westerhoff from AppleLust has written a superb article on the history of BSD. The article talks about the first versions of BSD and continues with the stories of NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSDi, and it finishes off with Darwin/MacOSX."

LiquidPC writes: "This is Part 2 in a two-part series on system panics. In his first column, Michael Lucas talked about how to prepare a FreeBSD system in case of a panic. In this column, he talks about what to do when the worst happens."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ONLamp has another article on securing small networks, this time with the current version of OpenBSD and pf. Quite good."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD developers just announced the release of an official snapshot of the upcoming FreeBSD 5.0 which should be expected in November. Time to try out amazing new feature like background fsck, FFS snapshots, KSC, devfs, SMPng and many more. Check the Release Notes for detailed information." Read on for a list of ISO mirrors, too.

Several people sent in variations on this: "Kind of ironic to see that the the site, dubbed WeHaveTheWayOut from Microsoft and Unisys runs on an Apache Web server powered by FreeBSD. This could have made a great April Fools joke, unfortunately for Microsoft, you can verify it by using Netcraft." This is a follow-up to the original story a few days ago. Other readers noted that there's already a WeHaveTheWayIn site up. Wehavethewayout.com was returning Apache headers yesterday; today it's returning "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0", so it appears they've dumped FreeBSD in a hurry, or maybe just changed the headers.

LiquidPC writes "In Part I of this series, Michael Lucas, from ONLamp.com, goes over preparing your FreeBSD computer for the worst in case of a system panic."

LiquidPC writes: "OSNews is running an article describing CVSup, mounting, ports, and the FreeBSD init system; focused primarily towards new users to FreeBSD."

Serin K Medusa writes: "The folks over at FreeBSD.org have put up a new 'roadmap' detailing the plan of action for the remainder of the year. In particular, check out the plans for a 5.0 preview and expected dates for 4.6. Interesting reading if you're following -CURRENT."

Chris Gilbert writes: "This Thursday, a new *BSD OS project went online which is entitled 'LainOS.' LainOS is for the most part a heavily recoded version of FreeBSD 4.5 made to eventually resemble Lain's Navi from the anime 'Serial Experiments Lain.' It sports an animated splash screen, a more fully integrated X server, and a custom graphical login interface, amoung several other improvments over FreeBSD and Linux. You can check the homepage out at http://www.lainos.org ."

Dahan writes: "I just saw that the development branch of NetBSD is now at version 1.5ZB. A change log is available for those interested. Note that although the title of the page says it's a list of changes from NetBSD 1.5 to 1.6, NetBSD 1.6 is not out yet--the page lists changes that will be in 1.6 whenever it's released. (And when will that be? "When it's ready," of course.) Standard caution about not running development kernels on mission-critical systems applies, although I've been running 1.5ZA on my DEC^H^H^HCompaq Alpha PC164 web/mail/DNS/whatever server for a few months now, and it's been great. And for those of you used to the Linux version numbering scheme and are wondering what all these letters mean, here's an explanation of NetBSD's version numbering."

Kees writes "Since this weekend there's a new *BSD portal site. You can find it at: nedbsd.be (the nedbsd.nl domain is coming too, but DNS works so slowly :-( ). This site is pretty unique, since it is the first portal site for *BSD users in The Netherlands, and the second one in Dutch. This site really looks like it's going to be a real community. Every Dutch/Belgian *BSD lover should give it a chance! The site is going to contain a huge pile of documentation, written by and for visitors. Just like the bsdvault.net. Everyone is welcome, everything is welcome."

RazzleDazzle writes: "AMD released a MP Athlon system that has been certified by Daemon News to work with FreeBSD. Read the full article here."

An unnamed reader submits: "Joshua Bergeron released ClosedBSD 1.0B today. ClosedBSD is a firewall which boots off of a single floppy diskette, and requires no hard drive. It is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as it's native ruleset manager. Best of all: it is freely available under the BSD License. ClosedBSD also features an advanced curses based configuration utility for designing and managing firewall rulesets: Screenshots available.

hubertf writes: "NetBSD/mvmeppc is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola MVME PowerPC Single Board Computers. This was made possible through a donation by Gan Starling of two (plus one loaner) MVME160x boards so that a porting effort could be made. Due to NetBSD's highly portable architecture, the operating system was up and running multi-user after just two weeks worth of part-time effort. A NetBSD/mvmeppc specific mailing list has been set up for people to discuss any issues with running NetBSD on their MVME PowerPC boards, and a snapshot of NetBSD/mvmeppc is also available for anyone wishing to experiment with the new port. Steve Woodford is the NetBSD/mvmeppc port maintainer."

Some random person wrote: "O'Reilly's OnLamp.com has a long article about using OpenBSD to secure small networks connected to the Internet."

LiquidPC writes: "Todd Miller has made his BSDCon slide presentation available online. It's primarily focused on new features in 3.0, the pf filter, and what to look forward to in 3.0.1."

LiquidPC writes: "OpenBSD's Louis Bertrand has put his MUSESS 2002 presentation online, entitled Fix the Bugs, Secure the System. Does an overview of OpenBSD, then explains Format String Ugliness, Buffer Overflows, The Wrong Way to Fix Overflows, along with numerous other things."

LiquidPC writes: "ONLamp.com's Big Scary Daemons section has yet another great new BSD article, this one on Understanding NFS and using it in FreeBSD."