gore,

I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a couple of years during the 4.x phase, but when it all went horribly wrong when the 5.x series came out, I was somewhat put off. I tried again recently with a different laptop with the 7.xs, and PC-BSD, and both crashed horribly during the installation causing file system destruction.

I'm wary to say the least...

I did make an attempt at starting to look at jails on my server, but stopped when I realised the fibre cards weren't supported.

westin,

block traffic from ip ranges that you know will never need to connect. [ie. China, North Korea, Nigeria, etc.]
That's good advice.