[by sven @ Thu Aug 15 2:46 CEST 2002]

Somewhere in November 2000 I decided to build a pc of serveral budget components taken from some old pc's that could act as an internet gateway for my small home network. I definitely wanted to run an Unix-like operating system on this gateway pc. After working some time with Linux Slackware on my desktop I discovered FreeBSD (a free operating system derived from BSD unix) and decided to install it on the gateway pc so I could learn FreeBSD. In that time I was still stucked with a 56K telephone modem, but in May 2001 eventually broadband internet reached my area and from that time on my gateway pc was 24 hours a day online. My ISP let me chose a hostname so I named it freegw, free because of FreeBSD and gw because it's primary function is to act as my internet gateway. The suffix xs4all.nl is the domain from my ISP.