After 5 years - Where does OPNsense stand?

[chemlud]

Happy New Year everybody, I know I'm late, but....

Lately I have been waiting for some details on 20.1 (or at least the beta...) or on 19.7.9. But the forum is very quite these days and especially from the masters of the universe nobody shows up these days to cheer up the crowd. :-)

So my question: 5 years into OPNsense, where does the project stand? Is there some short notice on the future plans for the project?

Would love to get some short, but meaningful info for the users how the project plans for the future.

Many thanks in advance

an old user

[franco]

Happy new year,

Let me write a short answer for now...

While we had steady progress over the years 2019 was a bit quieter than usual. This has some non-technical factors but mostly it means the software works in a number of scenarios without a problem and while there will be always missing features there aren't a lot of open live bugs:

https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Abug

Help is always appreciated and especially when it comes to the growing number of community support issues that are being raised which cannot be processed by the core team without taking all the time for maintaining and improving OPNsense:

https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Asupport&utf8=%E2%9C%93

HBSD has gone through some structural changes this fall and FBSD 12.1 was only released in September, which made for a tight time frame for adoption of those OS updates, but this is still all doable in 2020.

OpenSSL 1.0.2 was deprecated a week ago, wich means 20.1 will have OpenSSL 1.1.1 instead which means TLSv1.3 support is finally viable. Python 2.7 suffers the same fate, but that has already been carried out for the most part in 19.7.

Documentation was comprehensively updated in 2019 and community contributions are rare which either means it not that important or sufficient for a majority of users.

On the horizon is Suricata 5 and the improved ET rulesets, VXLAN and loopback device support. An MVC-based log viewer and already we have an all-improved health audit to find checksum errors in installed files and repair functionality.

i386 is being discontinued when we make the jump to HBSD 12.1 so that also counts as imminent progress. Some more changes and readjustments this year as well, but in general the track ahead is the same as always towards a smooth, reliable, and up-to-date firewall software distribution.

If for some the work done is not enough in the last ten major releases we've done, please go to the following archive and let us know how much is too much and how much is too little.

https://github.com/opnsense/changelog/tree/master/doc


Cheers,
Franco

[chemlud]

Hi Franco!

Many, many thanks for taking the time for this short summary of "OPNsense - the first 5 years" and beyond... :-D

I'm not a programmer and not experienced enough to write documentation, but try to provide some help where I can ;-)

Looking forward for 19.7.9 and 20.1

With the update of openSSL: TSL1.3 will then be available for openVPN, too?

Best for the busy year to come...

[directnupe]

Franco - thanks for this well thought out exhaustive and comprehensive update as to
The State of The Union - God Bless To You and Yours and

Happy New Year,

directnupe

Happy new year,

Let me write a short answer for now...

While we had steady progress over the years 2019 was a bit quieter than usual. This has some non-technical factors but mostly it means the software works in a number of scenarios without a problem and while there will be always missing features there aren't a lot of open live bugs:

https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Abug

Help is always appreciated and especially when it comes to the growing number of community support issues that are being raised which cannot be processed by the core team without taking all the time for maintaining and improving OPNsense:

https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Asupport&utf8=%E2%9C%93

HBSD has gone through some structural changes this fall and FBSD 12.1 was only released in September, which made for a tight time frame for adoption of those OS updates, but this is still all doable in 2020.

OpenSSL 1.0.2 was deprecated a week ago, wich means 20.1 will have OpenSSL 1.1.1 instead which means TLSv1.3 support is finally viable. Python 2.7 suffers the same fate, but that has already been carried out for the most part in 19.7.

Documentation was comprehensively updated in 2019 and community contributions are rare which either means it not that important or sufficient for a majority of users.

On the horizon is Suricata 5 and the improved ET rulesets, VXLAN and loopback device support. An MVC-based log viewer and already we have an all-improved health audit to find checksum errors in installed files and repair functionality.

i386 is being discontinued when we make the jump to HBSD 12.1 so that also counts as imminent progress. Some more changes and readjustments this year as well, but in general the track ahead is the same as always towards a smooth, reliable, and up-to-date firewall software distribution.

If for some the work done is not enough in the last ten major releases we've done, please go to the following archive and let us know how much is too much and how much is too little.

https://github.com/opnsense/changelog/tree/master/doc


Cheers,
Franco