To everything a season
On April 11, 2003, FreeBSD Update was committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. This binary security update system, which started out by supporting FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE and added support for newer releases as they came out, was the topic of a paper I presented at BSDCan'03 and is probably the leading factor behind my becoming a FreeBSD committer and ultimately the FreeBSD Security Officer. For five years, I distributed updates via update.daemonology.net; but that site has now outlived its purpose, and I have now taken it offline.Starting with FreeBSD 6.2, FreeBSD Update moved from the ports tree into the FreeBSD base system. Associated with this move, updates are now being built on hardware donated to the FreeBSD project rather than hardware which I personally own; and updates are being distributed via update.FreeBSD.org. As such, FreeBSD 6.1 was the last FreeBSD release supported via the version of FreeBSD Update in the ports tree and via update.daemonology.net.
However, FreeBSD 6.1 ceased to be supported at the end of May 2008; and for this reason, there is no longer any need for update.daemonology.net to exist, nor for security/freebsd-update to be in the ports tree -- and while I have not removed it yet, I will be removing that port in the near future.
For those people who are still using it (and I see from my server logs that there are about 600 such systems, many of which are still running FreeBSD 5.3 or 5.4): Wake up, get with the times, and upgrade your systems. FreeBSD 7.0 really is much better; you won't regret upgrading.
UPDATE: In response to a couple of emails, I've brought the bits back up at updateonelastchance.daemonology.net. They will stay here for another two weeks, then they're going to disappear permanently. To use these, change URL=http://update.daemonology.net/ to URL=http://updateonelastchance.daemonology.net/ in /usr/local/etc/freebsd-update.conf.