Hi folks,

I've finally found the time to make a new m0n0wall beta release:
1.2b5! I'm sorry that it took so long.

Before anyone asks: 1.2b4 has been skipped since I made a non-public
release with that version number and don't want to cause further
confusion.

I'm happy to report that m0n0wall 1.2b5 is the first release to be
based on FreeBSD 5.3, rather than the old (and stable) 4.x series. So
far, the transition has gone much better than I expected, and even
though a lot of little nasty issues have shown up again (things like
the dreaded ipf/ipfw processing order issue [fixed]) or are yet to
show up, I'm confident that FreeBSD 5.3 provides a good base
operating system for m0n0wall in the future. Each and every binary
has been recompiled and all patches (kernel, userland and 3rd party
programs) have been carefully reviewed and either thrown out (as was
- luckily - the case for some kernel patches) or modified to make
them work with 5.3.

FreeBSD 5.3 finally gives us, among other things, support for
Atheros-based 11a/b/g wireless cards. I've made the necessary
adjustments to the webGUI and conducted a few basic tests.

I still have several contributed patches lying around, waiting to be
integrated. Also, Fred Wright's ipfilter window scaling and IPsec new
SA preferral patches aren't in this release yet because they may need
changes for 5.3 (especially the IPsec one). Furthermore, the OpenVPN
support in this release may be broken, but it'll be replaced by a
reworked version (that doesn't clobber the optional interfaces
configuration anymore) as soon as Peter Curran gives me the go-ahead.
All of these things will probably happen in the next release - for
now, I wanted to focus on moving to 5.3.

Note that 32 MBs of RAM are now definitely no longer enough to run
1.2b5 (it's been marginal even with earlier versions). Also, 1.2b5 is
definitely *NOT* for use in production environments (unless you call
your home network a production environment too ;). I've tested each
image on the corresponding platform to make sure that it at least
boots, but that's about it. You've been warned.

Last but not least, make sure that your browser isn't using an old
version of the webGUI CSS (clear the cache if needed), as there have
been some changes (most notably on the firewall rule page).

Please see the m0n0wall home page for the detailed change log and the
downloads:

http://m0n0.ch/wall/beta.php

Enjoy!

- Manuel