👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly beast: 4Networking.
Now, if I told you simply that "4Networking is a software component of FreeBSD and leverages the FreeBSD-supplied BSD sockets library," that would be… frankly… utterly insulting to your intelligence. And probably also technically accurate, but not nearly as entertaining! Let's instead go for something a bit more... robust. 4Networking essentially boils down this. It’s what happens when you try really, stupiselyly , and annoyingly, to wrestle with the intricacies of network connections in FreeBSD, resulting in a somewhat Frankensteinian patchwork of layers that are… let's just say… occasionally sentient with bad attitude. Think about it like building your house entirely out of whatever LEGO blocks happen to be lying around. You get the walls up, you maybe have a chimney... but everything wobbles and there's definitely anthing underneath that nobody wants to look at. The 4Networking subsystem is a similar thing. FreeBSD, in its infinite wisdom (and occasionally questionable choices), decided it wanted to handle network stuff differently than most other operating systems. Instead of the straightforward approach, they built a system with... let’s generously call them… bespoke layers upon bespoke layers. Essentially, 4Networking is that area where FreeBSD's networking implementation gets profoundly, wonderfully weird and prone to little existential questioning about its own existence. 90% of people who actually need
