Introduction & Community Questions

[mitchskis]

Hello OPNsense community -

I'm dropping into the forum this weekend to introduce myself. I've been lurking since the m0n0.ch homepage posted a link to OPNsense. The work being done here seems sustainable. I hope to become a positive contributor to the community.

A little background about myself, my $DAYJOB is currently focused on customer facing network operations and support at a regional, diverse and high performance Internet network. Outside, I'm engaged in a number of projects ranging from volunteer wireless networks to medium-scale hospitality deployments. Projects like OPNsense support such diverse range of projects from virtual routing to site-wide NAT that I feel compelled to share my experience, if the community will accept the feedback loop. While I can offer little programing support, I can offer extensive QA and testing feedback. I'm also able to pickup some of the documentation role as needed.

I understand that many of the use case that I may envision or attempt may not be fully supported. What are the preferred platform to discuss potential bugs vs. non-supported configurations and to developing feature ideas into scoped feature requests?

 - - Mitchell

[franco]

Hi Mitchell, welcome.

QA and discussion is always needed, maybe even more than coding to offer a stable and capable project long-term. For discussing and reporting, I'd say:

o Forum: lots of feedback and discussions; exposure for ideas; sometimes hard to keep track of or bug reports that slip through in larger postings
o GitHub: good to drop in actual problems bugs and explained feature requests; ideal to track progress and get stuff done; less exposure for discussion with a wide audience
o Wiki: good to document what becomes permanent knowledge around the project, to describe features when they are implemented

I hope this helps. Looking forward to your input.


Thank you,
Franco

[mitchskis]

Franco -

Than you for the warm welcome, I appreciate your guidance in the project's Freenode channel yesterday while I was getting my feet wet with OPNsense. I hope to contribute to the overall project quality assurance process, in addition to the projects documented Q&As. Does the project have a need or gap in testing and quality assurance where I can jump in?

Also, which discussions are appropriate for the mailing list and webforum? I'll jump in either or both.

 - - Mitchell

[franco]

Mitchell, why, of course. Mailing lists aren't being used. Looks like we have a lot more end users who like the forum better. Ideally both of them should offer the same topic range, but the forum is the safer bet. Anything you can come up with.

Testing is always important by just setting up a box, noticing unwanted changes (best done in the development version which is always a couple of commits ahead of the stable version). Newly written components are Traffic Shaper, Proxy Server, Intrusion Detection -- VPN and Firewall pages have been refreshed and pruned. These would be the most important ones to screen, although all of these run smooth now after a round or two of follow up releases.

Captive portal has been deemed beyond fixing so Ad is currently rewriting it from scratch in the new framework. It will need initial testing soon, but it might take two or three more weeks.

Last but not least, there's also sticky posts in 15.7 forum from time to time that let you all know when new features are being rolled out in the test version (opnsense-devel), that is also a good starting point for test coverage on those particular items.