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Netcraft says, New York Internet, pair Networks and INetU had the most reliable hosting company sites in May 2009. Each of these sites responded resiliently to Netcraft’s performance collectors throughout the month, with not a single failed request. This is New York Internet’s second consecutive appearance at the top. Established in 1996, the company’s core services now include dedicated servers, colocation and virtual web hosting – all backed with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. Read more.

Sean Michael Kerner says, the open source FreeBSD operating system is out with its first major update in nearly a year. FreeBSD 7.1 includes numerous improvements over its predecessor FreeBSD 7.0, including Sun Microsystem-developed Dtrace technology as well as new boot options and scalability improvements. The FreeBSD 7.1 release comes as FreeBSD developers push toward a FreeBSD version 8.0 later this year. The FreeBSD 7.1 release also demonstrates how the open source ecosystem can extend across company lines as well different operating systems. FreeBSD is one of the earliest open source operating system projects and is a direct descendant of the original open source BSD work performed at the University of California, Berkeley. “DTrace is a mature and compelling technology for performance monitoring developed originally by Sun, released as open source as part of OpenSolaris,” FreeBSD core team member Robert Watson told InternetNews.com. “While we have had many tools for specific sorts of analysis in the past, DTrace is an excellent general-purpose framework for managing and presenting trace data, and also allowing us to more easily add new types of tracing.” Read more.

FreeBSD.org says, we are pleased to announce the availability of a dedicated YouTube channel for technical lectures about FreeBSD and other BSD operating systems. Read more.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team says, pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE. At this time 6.4-RELEASE is expected to be the last of the 6-STABLE releases. Some of the highlights: 1. New and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client 2. Support for the Camellia cipher 3. boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes 4. DVD install ISO images for amd64/i386 5. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3 6. Updates for BIND, sendmail, OpenPAM, and others . Read more.

The FreeBSD Project says, arc4random(9) is a generic-purpose random number generator based on the key stream generator of the RC4 cipher. It is expected to be cryptographically strong, and used throughout the FreeBSD kernel for a variety of purposes, some of which rely on its cryptographic strength. arc4random(9) is periodically reseeded with entropy from the FreeBSD kernel’s Yarrow random number generator, which gathers entropy from a variety of sources including hardware interrupts. During the boot process, additional entropy is provided to the Yarrow random number generator from userland, helping to ensure that adequate entropy is present for cryptographic purposes. Read more.

The FreeBSD Project says, IPv6 nodes use the Neighbor Discovery protocol to determine the link-layer address of other nodes, find routers, and maintain reachability information. The Neighbor Discovery protocol uses Neighbor Solicitation (ICMPv6 type 135) to query target nodes for their link-layer addresses. Read more.

Amjith Ramanujam says, recently the PC-BSD team released their latest stable version (PC-BSD 7) code-named Fibonacci Edition. Some of major changes from the previous version include a newer kernel, an experimental ZFS module, and a KDE 4 for desktop environment. Being a Linux junkie, I thought of this as a perfect opportunity to venture into the BSD arena. PC-BSD is a flavor of FreeBSD. Their official website describes PC-BSD as a complete desktop operating system, designed with the “casual” computer user in mind. This version is an effort to make the BSD Unix more accessible to newcomers, especially those who are switching from Windows or OS X. Read more.