PFSense is becoming closed source as announced by Netgate. IXSystems has take TrueNAS to Linux with Scale away from its BSD roots. While OPNSense is a BSD based firewall and often completes with PFSense they are based in Europe and do nto have 24 hour tech support. The one thing I am initially focusing on is transisting away from Scale back to a BSD storage server. I am transitioning back to Core right now as it is still supported with security patches. Once i complete that transition then I will transition to my next BSD variant and begin researching what is to ultimately become my own line of storage appliance. Linux is not compatible with ZFS int he kernel and therefore is a bolt on which results in performance issues along with other issues With IXSystems abondoning BSD io tend to go back to BSD as ZFS runs directly int he kernel. The performance benefits are significant as well as the stability. Unfortunately OpenZFS dev pace is waaaaay to fast on the Linux side. Filesystems should be slow and methodical and it’s time to pull back on the reigns at least for my current and future clients. Well the requirements haven’t changed…much but here’s the list from this earlier post:
- Local device at clients location acting as either a file server/NAS/Backup target has compressed/de-duplicated/encrypted local storage available at all times.
- This machine will have it’s own encrypted keys which means the data will not be readable by anyone else at any time without access to the control panel or webgui while the machine is on.
- This appliance will then send it’s previously secured data over a separately encrypted connection to an offsite backup server(run by me) to store the clients data offsite for DR purposes. this data will arrive on my infrastructure already encrypted without me ever knowing the key.
- The data will be further protected against intrusion via strict ACL’s so that nobody but the clients machine can read that data.
- My server will then send its data to a third party using yet another encryption key that will securely transport ALL client backups as further redundancy for both myself and my clients.
- Full Compatibility with Backblaze B2 and other offsite cloud storage vendors.
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