Re: [IPCop-user] The closing of IPCop.

[David W S. <da...@da...>]

On 10/10/2017 8:25 AM, viper wrote:
> Hello,
> i'm testing OPNsense for traffic shaping and it seems really good. (maybe
> better than IPCop).
> Traffic shaping options are more powerful and flexible.
> There are also many other things this distro can do..
> 
> i really like it.
> 
> thank you!
> 
> Il giorno sab 7 ott 2017 alle ore 06:52 Andrew McGlashan <
> and...@af...> ha scritto:
> 
>>
>> On 06/10/17 15:28, Haudy Kazemi wrote:
>>> 4a.) Pfsense is actively developed. It has many features and addons.
>> Probably possible to carry out the same tasks on the same or similar
>> hardware as IPCop. Using advanced features will require better hardware.
>>
>> I Suggest OPNSense for a bunch of reasons over pfSense -- it fits more
>> like the original Smoothwall -> IPCop days way back.
>>
>> The other option that I suggest as a replacement possibility is ClearOS.
>>
>> Cheers
>> AndrewM
>>

  One of the things to consider unless you are going to use old hardware 
forever is that there are some NUCS that will NOT boot from the MBR and 
must be UEFI. That shaves down the list greatly, personally I have no 
desire to continue to use the legacy MBR stuff. OPNsense I have been 
testing since it forked and the main devel has been receptive to my 
input, it also supports UEFI. The BSD kernel started supporting TMPFS 
years ago but I noticed that PFsense and the newly forked OPNsense at 
the time were still using the ramdisk filesystem when you optionally set 
it to run in a flash friendly manner in the web gui. TMPFS was 
implemented. This was three years ago mind you.

  Also note that LCDproc is available in OPNsense but it is not a plugin 
so you must use the cli to use the built in install script. Yes, I have 
an informational display fetish.

  Where people get all messed up over UEFI is that they do not realize 
that when you manually partition the system you MUST have a fat32 
partition and it does not need to be large, I never run more than 200MB 
and even that is way more than I need. Usually the fat32 partition gets 
mounted as /boot/efi and the bootloader on installation deposits a file 
in that partition. UEFI looks for a fat32 partition and reads the 
contents plain and simple. No MBR installation nor is an MBR capable 
system even needed. Legacy only booting firewall distros really need to 
move forward.

  I also have been running an Endian system and contributed some very 
minor changes that they implemented, hourly graphs and a favicon that 
does not look like a red minus symbol. Nothing groundbreaking. It has 
NTOP built in and that is likely more preferable to the legacy graphs 
anyway.

  The one thing I do not like about Endian, actually a few things, when 
you set up fixed leases you cannot see that any machines are actually 
using it at the moment since they use another method of DHCP which was 
the answer they gave me, you can only see dynamic leases in use that are 
not fixed leases. One major one is that the community edition is more 
limited than the pay for play versions and it is more testbed. If you 
want something tested, make beta versions. Also, one cannot easily 
acquire their own build tree and hack and build which is how I was able 
to give Raqcop to Cobalt Appliance owners. I'm not sure OPNsense is any 
different in that regard but it's the one distro I never feel the need 
to build my own version.

  If you do not care whether linux or unix, OPNsense is the one for me 
at least, everyone gets the same version rich or poor. I'm building a 
fanless 1.5u Kaby Lake system with 6 built in Intel nics and an i7 
processor. These newer processors if not taxed just sip power lightly 
but the power is there if the demand hits.

Dave Studeman