Netgate’s panicked response to it’s attempt to be nice leads to chaos..finally a reasonable resolution.

by | Oct 30, 2023 | Firewalls, FreeBSD, Open Source, PFSense, Security, Ubiquiti

First Netgate announced their move away from PSense free(known as CE).  This resulted in outcry but at least they announced their intentions.  Recently, Netgate announced the termination of the free homelab PFSense plus license with no option to keep it running.  Netgate got bumrushed on that decision and have since changed course to something highly reasonable.  The homelab license is now good until the release of 23.09.  Afterr that you wl need a tac lite subscription at $129/year to continue running PFSense+ on your own custom hardware.  This is perfectly reasonable.  In my view PFSense CE is on it’s way out.  It may take a decade, but CE is on it’s way out in terms of Netgate, it’s on it’s way out.  So what is my reccommendation now?

  1.  On your own har4dware, you can run PFSense CE OR you can run PFSense+ at a cost of $129/year.
  2. Purchase a Netgate 4100 series app.liance or higheer which comes wqith TAC lite and PFSense+ without any further cost.
  3. If I built your network with Unifi and your needs do not include advanced security and/or VPN, I will b3e reccomm3nding a Unifi firewall of some type.
  4. OPNSense will be reccommended for all other use cases that do not require vendor support.

Hewre is the video series about this entire saga:

  1.  The initial termination of the homelab license and the fallout.
  2. My revised firewall recommendations based on the previous announcement
  3. My now revised firewall recommendations with the recent corr3ction by Netgate