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Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

netgate.com

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Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#31

Post by martinmunk »

I've been using pfSense on 4 private sites for years by now. Luckily I've not upgraded from CE. I think what pisses people off is the rugpull of them pushing people to get a free upgraded license and then removing it soon after.

As for "but its free". I think its reasonable to expect the free offering to be promotional. I know I have bough Netgate HW and license for work because I was familiar with their free offering at home. But stuff like the recent move might make me reconsider.

Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#32

Post by auveair »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> Hey, listen, the company is putting a lot of effort into pfSense for which they are not paid.

And? pfsense uses thousands of packages that they don't pay for either, that's the spirit of open source, I can't understand who post this on HN without understanding it.

@dang: Can we ban these comments? Lately they arrive like clockwork and bring very little to the comments, especially since it doesn't seem to be talking about anyone here.

edit: at the time of this comment I can't find any top post complaining like the OP is describing.

Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#33

Post by deadfece »

nilespotter wrote: post #2

Massive influx of users to OPNsense

"Home+Lab has been installed thousands of times in 2023 alone."

This seems to indicate that nearly nobody was using it, even counting the illicit activities of the multiple appliance vendors.

If I have a modest lab automation with solid bracketing of fw release versions on some network scenarios, I could easily account for thousands of on-install telemetry entries per week.

I can imagine Hetzner alone would account for thousands upon thousands of installs.

Just based on their phrasing, I doubt there will be a massive influx to opnSense.

Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#35

Post by deadfece »

alias_neo wrote: post #17
LeoPanthera wrote: post #10

I migrated to OPNsense during the wireguard fiasco. It was an extremely boring migration, and I mean that as compliment. It's been quietly doing its job ever since, with a minimum of fuss.

Got any tips for the migration? I've been meaning to do it for a while, but I really need to limit down time or my wife and kids will bury me; preferably need to do it over an evening while they're all asleep. I only have the one piece of hardware so I need a record of the configs somehow to refer to as I do the migration. Perhaps also some sort of backup so I can restore it in a pinch if I can't get OPNSense set up…

When switching from pfsense to opnsense, I had to move everything to opnsense manually (and I do mean manually, not just updating terraform). It only took about 20 minutes to put things back on both members and have my tunnels up and going again, even counting my very specific customizations.

It was anti-climactic and worked so well as to be boring, which is the absolute highest compliment that a replacement and cutover can have.

Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#38

Post by dewey »

auveair wrote: post #32
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> Hey, listen, the company is putting a lot of effort into pfSense for which they are not paid. And? pfsense uses thousands of packages that they don't pay for either, that's the spirit of open source, I can't understand who post this on HN without understanding it. @dang: Can we ban these comments? Lately they arrive like clockwork and bring very little to the comments, especially since it doesn't seem to be talking…

> pfsense uses thousands of packages that they don't pay for either, that's the spirit of open source

You are miss-understanding what open source means. It doesn't mean everything has to be free. Many companies are built on top of open source software which allows them to do exactly that in their license. You also don't know if pfsense sponsors packages or contributes code to the packages they are using.

It's the right of every open source software author to continue working on their software privately under a different license, and that's exactly what happened here.

Just because you are not happy that you don't have access to their software for free any more doesn't mean it's against the open source spirit.

Re: Addressing Changes to PfSense Plus Home+Lab

#39

Post by n8henrie »

Lots of comments about moving to OPNSense -- anyone using something Linux-based that they would recommend as a comparable alternative?

My impression is that this might not exist yet (the currently available projects are significant lacking in either features or reliability), and that my odds of getting something user-friendly with tools like pfBlockerNG are even slimmer.

I always feel so handicapped when something breaks on my router, due to being so much less familiar with BSD, and due to it being an older / limited FreeBSD release (many things missing from the pf repos).

Just last week my pfsense upgrade resulted in a non-booting system, and I felt helpless (user error -- zpool upgrade but didn't upgrade something about the boot directory). I didn't have my usual tools, so I ended up having to install ZFS support to an old RPi3 running NixOS just so I could look around and get the ZFS parts sorted and figure out what happened. (Thankfully I eventually found an old mailing list thread with some obscure incantation that I ran from a pfsense installer usb and resurrected things.)

The whole time I just really wished that I could have been on a Linux machine with my familiar GNU tools!

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