So I’ve been using OPNsense for a few years. I have an extensive config inclduing vlans, plugins, policies, suricata, VPN, routes, gateways, HAProxy, etc.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed certain bugs, weirdness, and slowness within OPNsense. I recently watched Tom Lawrence’s video on the licensing changes and he touched on the openssl vulnerability that OPNsense has yet to remediate.
The Plus license cost (per year) which entitles you to some limited support options is also appealing. Every time I get stuck figuring out something complex in OPNsense, I have to hope someone else has tried to do the same thing and posted about it so I can troubleshoot.
I also don’t like having to constantly update. A more “stable”/enterprise focused cycle like pfSense has seems like my pace. It broke on me last year with one of the upgrades and I had to clean install.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the UI (mostly), plugins, etc. in OPNsense, but these past few months have got me thinking.
I’ve also heard that people don’t like Netgate as a company, so that could definitely factor into not switching.
What are everyone’s thoughts?
opnsense seems to be made by people who don’t hate me, so I use that.
OPNSense is far more willing to add “experimental” features and as a result you get a firewall that has more features out of the box, but is less stable.
pfSense is very slow to add new functionality, but the platform is rock solid as a result.
It all comes down to what you want. Do you want to play around with an appliance that has all the knobs, but also some eccentricities, or do you want an appliance that may not have bleeding edge features, but is far less prone to error.
I moved to VyOS from OPNSense, I like VyOS a bit better, because of Ansible integration etc + it’s Linux not FreeBSD
VyOS is very good. It’s a fork of Vyatta which was sold to brocade and sold again to ATT. Ubiquiti products use a fork of Vyatta as well (EdgeOS on their edge routers for example). I used to work with Vyatta and Brocade so I was a big fan of the Edge line for home and SMB. Since Ubiquiti shelved EdgeOS and stopped putting meaningful updates out I switched to VyOS rolling on my home router with one of those Beelink mini PCs with dual nics.
Is there anyway for us home labbers to get more recent versions of VyOS without having to build it? It used to be easily accessible, now, not so much.
They have step by step instructions in their documentation. They even give you the commands to run so you only have to copy and paste.
You literally git clone their repo, cd into the cloned directory, run a docker container and build the iso using the docker container. Took me 5-10 minutes using a single alder lake P core to make the .iso.
I have an extensive config inclduing vlans, plugins, policies, suricata, VPN, routes, gateways, HAProxy, etc.
When you have an extensive config, you should always test the upgrade on a “lab” machine before applying them to your “production” environment. You don’t just apply the update blindly and hope nothing breaks.
Nope. I have moved away several years ago from pfsense and could not be happier. I am running production off a 2 node, 24 vlan cluster and it’s rock solid
