BackupPC is a free and open source program that I personally think is at the top of the list in great back up tools. I am not a huge fan of GUI programs and dreaded web interfaces, but BackupPC's interface is fast, straight forward, not bloated, and directly linked to great documentation. BackupPC can also back up nearly any operating system, Windows or *nix, by using a variety of popular, free, tools (rsync, rsyncd, samba, tar).

There are some cases where a remote ports tree is a good thing to have around. For example, it can save bandwidth by downloading dist files only once and using them across all clients, when you need to know that all hosts using the tree have the same version of packages (good in development environment or large network), or even when the client doesn't have enough space for ports tree, distfiles, or the compile itself (NanoBSD!)

This is a basic setup involving a point-to-point IPSec VPN connection between a FreeBSD host and a Sonicwall TZ-170. This guide will probably work for most other versions of FreeBSD as well as other operating systems that use ipsec-tools and racoon.

For this tutorial, the FreeBSD source tree (/usr/src) should be installed. If you do not have it, look on the FTP and download the tree and use the install.sh all script.

Updating the BIOS on a Soekris board is pretty trivial compared to the method needed for an ALIX board. This is a short guide on how to get a Soekris board's BIOS updated via XMODEM transfer.