What is FreeBSD?

FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.

Why is FreeBSD so good?

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Cutting edge features

FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.

Powerful Internet solutions

FreeBSD makes an ideal Internet or Intranet server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.

Run a huge number of applications

The quality of FreeBSD combined with today's low-cost, high-speed PC hardware makes FreeBSD a very economical alternative to commercial UNIX® workstations. It is well-suited for a great number of both desktop and server applications.

Easy to install

FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape, an MS-DOS® partition, or if you have a network connection, you can install it directly over anonymous FTP or NFS. All you need is a couple of formatted 1.44MB floppies

FreeBSD is free

While you might expect an operating system with these features to sell for a high price, FreeBSD is available free of charge and comes with full source code. If you would like to purchase or download a copy to try out, more information is available.

About FreeBSD's Internetworking

FreeBSD was designed for the Internet

FreeBSD includes what many consider the reference implementation for TCP/IP software, the 4.4 BSD TCP/IP protocol stack, thereby making it ideal for network applications and the Internet.

FreeBSD supports standard TCP/IP protocols.

Like most UNIX® systems, the FreeBSD operating system enables you to

* Share filesystems with NFS
* Distribute network information with NIS
* Support remote logins
* Do remote SNMP configuration and management
* Serve files with FTP
* Resolve Internet hostnames with DNS/BIND
* Route packets between multiple interfaces, including PPP and SLIP lines
* Use IP Multicast services (the MBONE)

FreeBSD lets you to turn a PC into a World Wide Web server or Usenet news relay with included software. Using the included SAMBA software you can even share filesystems or printers with your Win95 and NT machines and, with the supplied PCNFS authentication daemon, you can support machines running PC/NFS. FreeBSD also supports Appletalk and Novell client/server networking (using an optional commercial package), making it a true "Intranet" networking solution.

FreeBSD also handles TCP extensions like the RFC-1323 high performance extension and RFC-1644 extension for transactions, plus SLIP and dial-on-demand PPP. It is an operating system suitable for a home-based net surfer as well as a corporate systems administrator.

FreeBSD's networking is stable and fast.

If you need an Internet server platform that is reliable and offers the best performance under heavy load, then consider FreeBSD. Here are just a few of the companies that make use of FreeBSD every day:

* Walnut Creek CDROM ran one of the most popular FTP servers on the Internet, ftp.cdrom.com, exclusively on FreeBSD for many years. It was a single FreeBSD machine supporting 6000 connections, and capable of transferring more than 30 terabytes (as of June, 1999; yes that is terabytes!) worth of files every month to more than 10 million people.
* Yahoo Inc. runs the ultimate index of the Internet, serving scads of daily net surfers with information about the World Wide Web. Yahoo, as well the companies that advertise on Yahoo, rely on FreeBSD to run reliable and responsive web servers.
* Netcraft is the leading researcher of web server software usage on the Internet. They use FreeBSD and Apache to power their website, and FreeBSD/Perl for all their Internet data collection.

FreeBSD makes an ideal platform for these and other Internet services:

* Company-wide or world-wide WWW service
* Proxy WWW service
* Anonymous FTP service
* Enterprise file, print and mail services

The FreeBSD ports collection contains ready-to-run software that makes it easy to set up your own Internet server.

High performance and security.

The FreeBSD developers are as concerned about security as they are about performance. FreeBSD includes kernel support for IP firewalling, as well other services, such as IP proxy gateways. If you put your corporate servers on the Internet, any computer running FreeBSD can act as a network firewall to protect them from outside attack.

Encryption software, secure shells, Kerberos, end-to-end encryption and secure RPC facilities are also available (subject to export restrictions).

Furthermore, the FreeBSD team is proactive in detecting and disseminating security information and bug reports with a security officer and ties to the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

What experts have to say . . .

``FreeBSD ... provides what is probably the most robust and capable TCP/IP stack in existence ...''

---Michael O'Brien, SunExpert August 1996 volume 7 number 8.

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