It is official, Vista has gone to RTM with build 6000! That's right kids, after 5 long years in development, VISTA is finally born! MSDN, and Software assurance customers will be able to download the full release within a week! 

As an update to my previous "Vista Licensing" post - it appears that the software giant has decided to loosen up a little. I have heard the Vista licensing model will be identical to that of XP.

What does RTM mean? Release to Manufacturing is exactly what it sounds like. After the final Release Candidate goes through a specified period of time with no reports of major bugs, the code is compiled, burned to a DVD, and delivered to manufaturing for mass-production.

If you do not have an MSDN subscription, or have a Software Assurance agreement with M$, you won't be able to get your hands on Vista until January. In early January, you will be able to purchase PC's pre-loaded with Vista. In February you can actually go to your favorite retail store, and purchase the OS. 

SmoothWall Express is an extremely easy to configure, and lightweight firewall. The download consists of a 45 MB .ISO CD Image. Simply download the .ISO, burn it to a CD, grab that old clunker PC that has been sitting in your closet for 3 years, and turn it into a powerful Firewall! The only real requirement here is that the old 'clunker' PC needs to have 2 nics.

Pop the CD in, boot up, and follow the prompts. When the installation detects your NICS, the 'Green' NIC is the connection to your private network, and the 'Red' NIC is the connection to the Internet. Installation takes about 10 minutes, and when you are done, all management is done via a Web Browser.

In addition to having a very simple, secure Firewall, you have the added benefit of a build in Intrusion Detection System, VPN, SSH, and fully functional Apache Web Server, of yeah - and a web proxy as well. Graphs! Who doesn't like to see a nice visual representation of what's happening on their server?