OPNsense vs. pfSense article - any thoughts on that?

[dcol]

Franco, Thought you might get a chuckle about this, I have just been banned on the PFsense forum. Probably for things I have said in this forum because I just visited that forum, by mistake, for the first time in weeks and I was banned. You really hit a nerve with the PFsense people. Shows they are threatened by such a great product. But really they loose because I have dozens of PFsense installations I service and was ready to start contract talks with Netgate. This last nail in the coffin for them will see me move all my accounts to OPNsense over the next year.
Beside I have other login accounts at PFsense that still work, so they didn't accomplish anything. Just shows what I have been dealing with over there and why I was looking for an alternative, and I am glad I did.
Keep up the good work.

[elektroinside]

I just deleted my pfsense forum account. Didn't contribute much, way less then here, but i browsed it a lot. When 18.1 will be out, i'll migrate all my clients to OPNsense. Lots of work, but it's worth it. Don't want to throw mud and blood so my reasons are irrelevant at this point, pfsense has been a good companion over the years, so all I can and will say is that i feel that they forgot about their roots. And i hate this.

Franco is one of those people who care, as limited his time may be. OPNsense feels like a fresh breath and things are going in the right direction, at least for my tastes.

Keep up the awesome work!

[Mosley]

If it's indeed like you say, it's pretty sad. I hate when companies forget their roots and change for the worse like that too. Users leaving can sometimes straighten them up again though, so good luck to them.

[dcol]

Once they go fully commercial, they won't go back. When that happens, watch for a flood of new OPNsense users. Besides IPS doesn't work well on their system. And as far as I am concerned, you don't have a true firewall without IPS. IMO

[elektroinside]

Agreed. And that's good for OPNsense. They have signed with qnap in the last past days. Although the idea seems, at first, nice, i would not trust my network's security to a vm inside a NAS (if i remember correctly, it will run inside a vm). Not to mention performance. Imagine the bottlenecks in a busy network. But... it might work for small businesses. Anyway, too many failing points with this design. The proper way to do it will always be 2 dedicated physical machines with high availability enabled.

[franco]

QNAP broadens the reach of an otherwise capped growth potential. That's nice to see for them.

We have our own interesting announcement to share on top of the 18.1 release next week. It's mainly a twist to what is already possible, but it may have major implications for making a favourable decision towards OPNsense in the future. ;)


Cheers,
Franco

[Ciprian]

We have our own interesting announcement to share on top of the 18.1 release next week. It's mainly a twist to what is already possible, but it may have major implications for making a favourable decision towards OPNsense in the future. ;)


Cheers,
Franco

Is it 29th of January yet?!?! :D

I can barely wait, would you please spoil something, better now then latter? :)

[elektroinside]

Yes, from their POV, it's completely true. Obviously, i would also expect other major moves in the future, it's a business after all. They have to at  least try. For OPNsense as well, that's a business too.

But i'm a lot more interested in OPNsense, so looking forward for the announcement :-)

[elektroinside]

Is it 29th of January yet?!?! :D

I can barely wait, would you please spoil something, better now then latter? :)

Lol 😂 Agreed! Come on Franco, just a little something :-))

[franco]

Nope. :)

[Ciprian]

Oh, Franco, you're so mean!... :D

[elektroinside]

We'll call him "Franco De Mean" from now on, to throw in a little French nobleman-ish ambience:-D (joking of course)

[dcol]

I hopes it's zfs

[Ciprian]

Why do you want ZFS so badly? :)

I remember you asked for it in the past (or maybe I'm wrong, and wasn't you?), and I answered that ZFS has particular HW requirements without which it wouldn't bring any significant advantages over other file systems. Quite contrary, without those HW reqs ZFS has the potential to do more harm than good.

But maybe I miss some info, and your arguments would be really welcome.

[dcol]

ZFS provides redundancy if setup as a mirror. A nice feature when some firewalls are very remote. If a disk goes down the firewall keeps running until you have a chance to replace it.