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This book was published in December 2000 and included FreeBSD version 4.2 on a CD. A Second Printing of this book appeared in February 2002 and included FreeBSD 4.4 on CDROM.

The FreeBSD version 4.X release train starting with versions 4.0 in March 2000 and ending with version 4.11, which is planned sometime during the fourth quarter of 2004, is overall a very smooth release train characterized by a long series of incremental improvements. While FreeBSD 3.x was widely regarded as the first truly commercial-quality FreeBSD that was post-Net/2 encumberance, in FreeBSD 4.x the system underwent a tremendous level of refinement. Many of the older "nuisance" bugs, such as failing to detect greater than 16MB on certain hardware platforms, were fixed, and a few drivers that didn't make it into the new CAM framework were finally completed. A large growth of commercial device drivers occurred with the 4.X series. Yet, despite this, the current version 4.10 still looks very similar to version 4.0, and all releases in this train have solid reputations for reliability. The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide is very applicable to all versions in this release train. It is expected that the FreeBSD 4.x release series will be used for many years in the future.

As for older versions, the book tries to be as applicable as possible to earlier versions of FreeBSD back through version 2.2. FreeBSD versions earlier than that are too different for this book to be helpful with.

The FreeBSD 5.X release train which started with 5.0 released in January 2003 is a fundamental and significant shift for FreeBSD. Conservative users were cautioned against using this version; please see the warning in the announcement message at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/announce.html. Development of FreeBSD 5.x actually started the same time that version 4.0 was released. The decision to split the development into 2 release trains was made to enhance stability.

FreeBSD 5.3, which is expected late in the fourth quarter of 2004, is regarded as the first true production release of FreeBSD 5.

The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide was written in 1999 and early 2000, well before the architecting of FreeBSD 5 was complete. As a result of this, the book has a number of sections that do differ markedly from FreeBSD 5. Although there is still a lot of familiarity, the book will have less and less applicability to the 5.X release as this release advances in versions and comes into mainstream use. Please keep an eye on the Tech Notes section of this Web site for future articles that cover this area.

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© Copyright 2000-2003 Ted Mittelstaedt. All rights reserved.