Switching back to Pfsense
Been very happy using Opnsense for a while now. There were many reasons I enjoyed Opnsense
- More frequently updated than Pfsense
- There were more tutorial videos covering every aspect
- Fully customizable
- The community was growing
- Easier to use and setup
After setting up Opnsense to my needs to one day in March, I find out it no longer works for me. Was a bit frustrating. Went over with relatives on how to connect to my game servers so we can all play together once again. Found out the main culprit that was preventing that. It was related to the port forwarding rules. Opnsense was updating the firewall rules section and going to a new module from what their patch notes read. There was an option to migrate to the new module, which I proceeded to try. Found my port forwarding rules were duplicated and weren’t working. Followed many forums posts, YouTube videos and Google Gemini to resolve this issue over the next few days until I found this video which explained the issue.
Wanting to play online with my relatives was the main goal. Decided to re-installed Pfsense and had everything in working order in an afternoon. Many services were setup, tested and found to be working.
- Cloudflare DDNS
- Port forwarding
- Geo IP blocking
- Suricata IDS/IPS
- VPN
- and VLANs
Pfsense is great, the main reason moving away originally was the lagging updates compared to Opnsense. Opnsense is more cutting edge on updates which I preferred. Pfsense is rock solid and just works. Maybe down the road with time passing I can switch back to Opnsense. Both are great products and just use whatever tools works for the job.
