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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

PFSense was nothing but a failure for me. Installing it at multiple clients caused me to have nightmarish drives to fix simple issues (PFSense would refuse to boot if the 2nd WAN port was down, decide it had an Intel NIC and take hours to boot, get wedged, etc).

The real kick in the pants was when they killed UDP multicast forwarding with no warning when upgrading, just boom, IPTV no longer works! We moved to Lede, which has been extremely fault tolerant. I no longer worry that I won't be able to remotely fix a router just cause it had a minor hardware issue.

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You also gain extra hardware and protocol support by going to a Linux based solution e.g. BSD does not support 6LoWPAN or any IEEE 802.15.5 hardware to my knowledge.

There are lots of packages that just don't get maintained on BSD, when it comes to gigabit or less routers the whole market for consumer and small/medium business is based on customized versions of OpenWRT from the large router vendors. The depth of maintained packages and documentation is significantly larger.

I love FreeBSD, but as a routing platform, VyOS/EdgeOS are pretty nice.

There's also Router7 recently shown on HN: "Show HN: Router7 – A pure-Go implementation of a small home internet router" [1]

PC Engines APU2 [2] is a good hardware platform, and then there's the more expensive but complete Turris Omnia / Turris Mox.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17530086

[2] http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

router7 is really cool.

What's your hardware story?

We had a few netgate boxes, but ran into RAM dying on two of 'em, which would cause them to get wedged iirc (Never ran into wedging outside Netgate boxes). On that particular model the ram was soldered down, making it a nightmare to repair.

On the custom boxes we put in later, it was less hardware issues and much more LTE modem failure (where the LTE modem needed a reboot and wasn't offering a USB ethernet interface, causing PFSense to halt and catch fire).

Today we're split between Ubiquiti's UniFi for our earlier rollouts after dumping PFSense, and Lede for the latter ones as the remote, centralized manageability of both is a huge leap forward from what PFSense ever offered us. I can pull live stats, configure VLANs and implement them remotely and much more.

I looked at pfsense before going with Ubitquti/UniFi. Have to say I'm really happy with it, breeze to setup and does 99% if what you want to do out of the box.

The UniFi suite has some rough edges, the Unifi Security Gateways will just sit there in a useless state if both WANs are down and they are rebooted (until one of the WANs comes up and they connect to the controller). That is a less common scenario, but its still annoying & breaks the local network. Better to run in a crippled state than not at all IMO!

If the blocking issue is a startup connection to its controller, could this be mitigated by having a local controller?

Ouch, that is bad. I guess that will happen pretty much every time there is an power outage.

If internet hasn't recovered all local devices will boot up and not even get an IP?

Na, the Cable/DSL modems and LTE Modems we spec out usually come online a bit before the USG. Ubiquiti's USG and USG Pro take a solid minute to boot, much longer than the modems take. That was another nice feature of Lede, it is booted and ready in well under a minute.

That assumes that internet is working and that all the gear on the way also have had time to boot. That is very much not guaranteed. And if you ever have an internet outage this is probably a likely time to have it.

I also realized that we probably don't have this problem. The controller is in a VM that is pretty much only booted when we need to edit something. So most of the time there won't be any controller to talk to during boot.

cmb the core developer of PFSense went over to Ubiqiti and a new company (Netgate) is now in charge of PFSense.

What’s the takeaway? Are they doing a good job?

labeling cmb "the core developer" is inaccurate. There are many others, but Chris did provide leadership for the project until he left.

There are an easy half dozen senior engineers working on pfSense now.

I'm looking forward to any answers on the "are they doing a good job?" portion. Feedback is a gift.

Love that you are responding on here. It’s great to have your outreach.

Chris and electric sheep fencing sure felt like the core developer for a while.

Clearly he left for a reason. He’s stayed silent about it but rarely does a founder leave without their company being acquired. Feels like he didn’t like the working relationship as it matured.

Personally, I don’t like the change in pricing for support plans that was implemented and I haven’t recommended the products netgate sells since that change. I was helping sell around 10 of your firewalls a year before that.

Nor do I like how OPNSense was treated by netgate. That was dirty stuff.

In any case, you don’t need me to like how you run your business if you have bigger customers that you pivoted to chase. I was small potato’s.

> I was small potato’s

Still important though. Thanks for writing.

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