OPNsense vs. pfSense article - any thoughts on that?

[Ciprian]

I was 99,9% sure you are thinking about the redundancy offered by ZFS as the main reason to be used in OPNSense.

Completely agree that ZFS provides redundancy, completely agree that ZFS is a very robust and resilient FS, but it is designed to make the data checks (immediately after the read of that data, on-the-fly check-ups) and periodic scrubs on storage considering that data and/ or hashes in RAM are the correct one. So, it implies that RAM memory should be ECC RAM, so that no RAM memory errors would get pushed to storage as "correct", overwriting the really correct, but mistakenly considered as corrupted, data on storage.

If ZFS, and if production, you wouldn't risk a RAM failure being considered as a storage failure - multiple points of failure. Also, I guess many user wouldn't like to be "forced" to use ECC RAM in their HW setups - look at pfSense and the storm they provoked getting more and more pushy, hammering the "my way or the highway" approach on users.

I'm sure there are alternative ways to get redundancy on your OPNsense setup, and ZFS could be, IMHO, at most an option, not the only option.

[franco]

ZFS is gaining priority as we have cleared a lot of other things that were more pressing, but that's not what the announcement is about. For me, the roadmap in 2018 has remote syslog improvements via Syslog-NG, the migration of the Monit plugin to core and introducing ZFS into the installer (amd64 only like UEFI/GPT).


Cheers,
Franco

[dcol]

Looking forward to ZFS. most of my firewall installations are remotely maintained.
The packaged version of Monit will also help with remote maintenance.
Keep up the great work.