8000 Forum Members!

[cibomato]

Hi alltogether,

> 1000 forum menbers in such a short period of time!
Congratulations!

Keep on with that great work!
Cheers,
Jochen

[franco]

Hi Jochen,

thanks for mentioning this! It's been an amazing ride so far: ups and downs, but I think that we've delivered what we promised. Lots of modernisation and generalisation towards FreeBSD. It makes this project easier to maintain in the future, helping us to concentrate our efforts on the actual value for the users as opposed to reinventing the wheel and creating huge time sinks for keeping the project running, also helping contributors to submit patches with minimal demotivation along the way.

The only other thing that I want to add is: 15.7 soon, and we're not going anywhere. :)


Cheers,
Franco

[cibomato]

We've reached 2000! And climbing.... :)

[LordD1]

Because OPNsense rocks!!!
I bet this really going get a lot of people taking a second look at us now.

[weust]

Are these actual people or does it include the spammers?

[franco]

I'm trying to remove all spam accounts when they do post, but there are some that don't post at all. It's impossible to say how many are spam. Only counting the people with posts is also unfair to the lurkers, so we'll never know. :)

[Supermule]

Its goooooooooooood :)

[cibomato]

We've reached 4000! Awesome! :)

Cheers,
Jochen

[franco]

Not bad at all. 8)

[bhawk]

Well i know its not the right place but i'd like to say hello at first  ;D
been using pfsense for the past 3-4 years for our various offices and i loved the fact i could always build it myself unless that is you all know what happened  :-X
got to know about opnsense from a friend and decided to pay a visit here and i am so glad to see so much done in such a short time. kudos to you all
on to some serious topics
1. i hope you guys never take away your tools :P
2. can someone please summarize what the differences are so far from pfsense apart from the license difference? i'll be regular from here on but a summary of teh differences so far will be a great help :)
3. tools! what differences are there in build system from pfsense? and has there been a guide set up for using tools? i will be setting up a test firewall (opnsense ofcourse :P) tomorrow but from then on i like to build my firewall on my own so a guide will be really helpful

Lastly, i'd like to appreciate again awesome work that has been done so far in sucha  short time :)
See you guys arounnd

[cmb]

Congrats on the thousands of spam bots. Or maybe you have thousands of lurking users with 0 posts who are big fans of SEO, weight loss, pornography, and all the other things typical to back link spam.

Couple tips. Bad Behavior is a good plugin to cut way down on the abuse with minimal false positives. And you can clean up much of the mess with:

Code Select Expand

delete from smf_members where posts=0 and website_url <> ''

s/delete/select/ first to verify what you're deleting.

been using pfsense for the past 3-4 years for our various offices and i loved the fact i could always build it myself unless that is you all know what happened  :-X

Nothing happened to prevent you from doing that. But you were building from pfsense-tools as recently as a couple months ago, so you're obviously aware of that.

More recently, -tools doesn't even exist anymore, you can build 2.3 strictly from what's publicly available on github.

Though you're wasting your time building yourself IMO, whether pfSense or OPNsense.

[franco]

Congrats on the thousands of spam bots. Or maybe you have thousands of lurking users with 0 posts who are big fans of SEO, weight loss, pornography, and all the other things typical to back link spam.

You're free to troll on your own board. This is your last warning, Chris. Be kind or be gone.

[franco]

Well i know its not the right place but i'd like to say hello at first  ;D

Hello there. :)

1. i hope you guys never take away your tools :P

It's barely any work now, except the initial rewrite we did to bring it back. Eventually, it'll be even less work when we can get rid of the last customisation patches in the FreeBSD ecosystem so we can cut down the code and overrides of FreeBSD. It stays.

2. can someone please summarize what the differences are so far from pfsense apart from the license difference? i'll be regular from here on but a summary of teh differences so far will be a great help :)

The list keeps getting longer and I tend to forget cool things along the way as they become the new normal, but maybe this will suffice:

o Redesigned firmware upgrades to allow faster update cycles to ship security patches, but fixes and features in a timely fashion (right now about once a week). People love the seamless upgrade workflow. They get itchy when they don't have new updates for two weeks. ;)

o The bootstrap GUI point is almost moot, but for the sake of the argument we're reworking all GUI things that we don't like for usability and user experience as well as making the layout fancy. See e.g. https://opnsense.org/system-health-whats-next/ or the way we redesigned the VPN section and are going to redesign the firewall section (almost ready).

o We're aiming to keep an open platform to allow easy builds and extensibility without the need for overrides and too many custom hooks, so people are free to: build their own OPNsense, implement their own plugins, add their own ports and packages, build their own projects or appliances with the framework. We can even do "side-grades" like we do with LibreSSL/OpenSSL or our release and development version. All of those options without having to reboot.

o I know plugins are a weak point, but 10 years of an active community account for a lot larger ecosystem. We've decided the old packages system wasn't something we ought to keep (it was over 5000 lines strong), so we are currently rewriting it for 16.1, albeit making it easier to conjure plugins in the first place. To bridge the gap we've included squid (proxy server) and suricata (intrusion detection) into the base installation. We've also added the OpenVPN client exporter. Some people work on routing extensions now (quagga), captive portal voucher plugins, etc.

That's my favourite points on top of everything is supposed to work as is nowadays. For more what we believed to be unique works when we did them consult the following URLs.

For 15.1: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=817.0
For 15.7: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=837.0

3. tools! what differences are there in build system from pfsense? and has there been a guide set up for using tools? i will be setting up a test firewall (opnsense ofcourse :P) tomorrow but from then on i like to build my firewall on my own so a guide will be really helpful

Simple and easy build scripts aligned with FreeBSD/pkgng based on the notion of reproducible builds (no more "build a few times until it works"). I can't say more than this, because it's not a lot of code and you'll see. The documentation is here:

https://github.com/opnsense/tools/blob/master/README.md

Let us know how we can improve it further. :)


Cheers,
Franco

[bhawk]

Though you're wasting your time building yourself IMO, whether pfSense or OPNsense.

You dont even know waht my needs are or what arent my needs for that  matter. so telling me that its a waste of time or isnt is for me to decide not you :)

[bhawk]

It's barely any work now, except the initial rewrite we did to bring it back. Eventually, it'll be even less work when we can get rid of the last customisation patches in the FreeBSD ecosystem so we can cut down the code and overrides of FreeBSD. It stays.

taking a closer look at the tools and its a  job well done :)
constant chopping and changing is what makes things difficult and i hope changes will be very minimal (if any)

The list keeps getting longer and I tend to forget cool things along the way as they become the new normal, but maybe this will suffice:

o Redesigned firmware upgrades to allow faster update cycles to ship security patches, but fixes and features in a timely fashion (right now about once a week). People love the seamless upgrade workflow. They get itchy when they don't have new updates for two weeks. ;)

o The bootstrap GUI point is almost moot, but for the sake of the argument we're reworking all GUI things that we don't like for usability and user experience as well as making the layout fancy. See e.g. https://opnsense.org/system-health-whats-next/ or the way we redesigned the VPN section and are going to redesign the firewall section (almost ready).

o We're aiming to keep an open platform to allow easy builds and extensibility without the need for overrides and too many custom hooks, so people are free to: build their own OPNsense, implement their own plugins, add their own ports and packages, build their own projects or appliances with the framework. We can even do "side-grades" like we do with LibreSSL/OpenSSL or our release and development version. All of those options without having to reboot.

o I know plugins are a weak point, but 10 years of an active community account for a lot larger ecosystem. We've decided the old packages system wasn't something we ought to keep (it was over 5000 lines strong), so we are currently rewriting it for 16.1, albeit making it easier to conjure plugins in the first place. To bridge the gap we've included squid (proxy server) and suricata (intrusion detection) into the base installation. We've also added the OpenVPN client exporter. Some people work on routing extensions now (quagga), captive portal voucher plugins, etc.

That's my favourite points on top of everything is supposed to work as is nowadays. For more what we believed to be unique works when we did them consult the following URLs.

For 15.1: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=817.0
For 15.7: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=837.0

that summarized list is pretty long in itself :)
will take some time to explore it all and i will make sure to provvide feedback asap
What actually got my attention here was the mention of quagga because i myself have been recently thinking about working on it, seems interesting little (if it should be called that :P) project in itself

lastly thanks for the detailed reply and i really hope we can get accustomed to OPNSENSE and contribute to its betterment if possible