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General Discussion / Re: Migrated to OPNsense - first impressions, rants and praise
« on: March 09, 2018, 12:40:48 am »Hi there,Thanks a bunch , I am hoping the switch was worth it so I hope to stay for a long time.
Thanks for your feedback and welcome. Let's see...
That's bad news, but this is more of a FreeBSD issue than OPNsense then.First impression installer:
Like others have pointed out here I do get the error 19 issue during installing. I used the i386 image on several usb memsticks, but it fails with error 19 when it tries to mount the root filesystem before installing. As far as I am able to understand it seems like FreeBSD shuts off the USB ports and therefore will not see the memstick anymore.
The way I solved this was to download the OPNsense nano image on my existing pfsense box that luckily have two disks , I dd'ed the image over to one of the disks , rebooted and voila!
It seems that FreeBSD is getting more and more hostile towards embedded and legacy hardware. We try to be as close to their stock settings as we can, but that has been increasingly difficult with boot panics and mount error. If anyone has an idea how to change that that would be great, because we neither have the time nor experience to start working in FreeBSD hardware support to avoid such problems in the future.
Yes this is the animations I am talking about. Perhaps a bit off topic , but I am sick to death of all the "modern" GUI styles that do waste lots of pixels. I realize that this is a web interface, but usually animations should be a preferenece settings in the OS for those that want that. My suggestion is to color the main menu items a bit brighter than the submenus and indent properly. No need for animations as they only slows down things.First impression (and rants) on the webgui.
What I don't like is that the webgui have animations that can't be turned off (at least I have not found a way yet) and I especially don't like that the webgui do not have a compact version. The webgui follows the modern sickness of having tons of padding and unused space take up lots of valuable screen space. Luckily most browsers today allow you to zoom down the webpage (and remembers it) so I am able to bypass most of the annoyance this way.
It used to be a lot worse with padding, but I understand what you mean. The animations to my knowledge are menu, tab fade in/out and the modal dialogs. They could be removed, or a theme without animations could be crafted? Are these the animations you talk about?
What I meant was , when I go to the lobby page I instantly want to see CPU graph and traffic graph history for the last X minutes/hours or so because this is a lot more useful. Like it is now the graph restarts every time. And yes, you would have to store that data , but this can be done in memory and not necessarily on disk.I also dislike very much that the traffic graph widget starts over every time I visit the lobby page.
I don't think that changed. Maybe the fact that it builds up until it has all the data in its window to slide forward is what gives you that impression?
it is a Xeon 2.4Ghz dual core processor , so while it may be a bit dated , GUI stuff should not be an issue I think.At times the webgui is awfully slow as well , and because some drop down boxes are expanded when you first load the page it is easy to "miss" a GUI element when you are clicking around.
You said i386 so it could be a slow hardware issue. I've seen this with MVC pages that load its data via API, the devices can be slow to answer / fill the screen.
Yes, I am aware of that. It is a matter of taste and I absolutely prefer pfSense's colored separators. Coloring rules (not necessarily the entire line) could be useful as well. You could "tag" lines with various colors to indiace red = block ,green = pass or whatever the user fees like.It would have been nice if you could (like pfSense) add separators or group stuff like aliases, firewall rules etc, and some dropdown boxes does not allow you to see all of the content (the subnet mask selector) on the browser that I use at least (SeaMonkey).
Separators are skeumorphic as they don't follow data modelling. Instead, we do have categories for firewall rules and starting with 18.1.3 these will be a bit more prominent with the selector in the top right corner.
https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/2182
Yes I can. I plan to try it out soon - The thing is that I have been busy with sick relatives, but I will try to test it out. I might even install this today as a power outage is planned for tomorrowI also really miss the NUT plugin (network ups tools) from pfSense and there is a few other things like the ClamAV engine that was not as easy as 1-2-3 to figure out, does it require a proxy or not??!
You can help Michael with NUT plugin testing so it can finally be released.
Agree, having things that you don't need removeable is a good thing.I would also like to disable OpenDNS and remove it from the webgui , but that does not seem possible yet.
We could make it a plugin, but it's just a tiny page with no software dependencies. Maybe it can go the same route as Dynamic DNS -- move to plugins, but keep in the default install?
For example I won't use high availabillity and opendns and the way it is right now it just clutters the GUI with stuff that I personally don't need. It is good to have options by default , but having the ability to hide menu items would be a good thing.
Keep up the good work Cheers for now!