Replacement for RV-340

[ddaenen1]

pfsense+ has more features than CE.
For example, they introduced boot environments where you can take a snapshot of the router's filesystem and then pfsense can restore itself to the point when the snapshot was taken. Then you can make a change that breaks the firewall or it may gets hacked and compromised, and then with a simple reboot it goes back to the clean state when the snapshot was taken.

I have now moved over from CE to Plus. I first did it on my "Cisco C170 test router" to see if the update process from CE to Plus was smooth. No issues there. My main concern actually was for how long it would still be possible to upgrade to Plus from CE without too much hassle. My take on it was that as both versions develop, they may also drift apart to a point where a switch from CE to Plus might translate in an entirely new install where maybe it is not possible to restore the CE backup file on to a Plus installation.

The boot environment is a nice feature but i also like the fact that i now can see if anything going on with my ZFS drives as i have 2 SSD's in Mirror. On CE, you cannot see if one of the drives is producing errors which may mean that by the time you know something is going wrong the router fails and since i work from home often, unplanned downtime would be rather painful.

 

[Christos]

Yesterday I installed pfsense 23.1 that is experimental. Before starting the upgrade, the system automatically took a quick snapshot of the previous installation. This snapshot takes just 24 Kbytes on hard disk
If I change my mind, I can click 1 button to activate that quick snapshot and then reboot to fully restore the router's previous state. It is magic.
Imagine having this level of safety in a production environment.

 

[ddaenen1]

Yesterday I installed pfsense 23.1 that is experimental. Before starting the upgrade, the system automatically took a quick snapshot of the previous installation. This snapshot takes just 24 Kbytes on hard disk
If I change my mind, I can click 1 button to activate that quick snapshot and then reboot to fully restore the router's previous state. It is magic.
Imagine having this level of safety in a production environment.

First impressions on 23.01? I will probably install it on the C170 first to ensure i don't bump into any config issues especially with the move to FreeBSD14-CURRENT and php8.1. Main concerns are with pfBlockerNG, HAproxy and VLAN's.

 

[Christos]

First impressions on 23.01? I will probably install it on the C170 first to ensure i don't bump into any config issues especially with the move to FreeBSD14-CURRENT and php8.1. Main concerns are with pfBlockerNG, HAproxy and VLAN's.

VLANs are working fine so far.
I don’t use pfblockerng but I heard that it had some problems with the python module for Unbound. I use RPZ zones on Unbound and they still work fine.
I had one problem, that is I hadn’t checked “keep configuration” on WireGuard and I lost all settings because the upgrade reinstalled the package. Keep in mind to check this option before any major upgrade.