On Thu, 7 Sept 2023 at 11:33, Val Kulkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I am curious what OpenWRT didn't provide that pfSense or OPNsense do provide.
I'm moving from DD-WRT to OPNsense (or maybe pfSense). One of the primary reasons I'm doing so is for keeping the firmware up to date. With all the "WRT" software (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, FreshTomato) there was always something that made it difficult to maintain my router at a release with the latest security fixes. With DD-WRT it's hard to tell what the latest release to use is. It seems the philosophy is "Try the latest. If it doesn't work, try previous ones and/or discuss or report the problem". With OpenWRT, it appears you have to re-install any manually installed packages after a system upgrade. Another problem with OpenWRT is that they seem to frequently up the minimum hardware requirements (flash and RAM) and drop support for older hardware with low resources. FreshTomato looks good for maintaining the latest firmware. However, it's limited to Broadcom based systems. Because of this, I'm not sure it will continue to be maintained in the long run. With OPNsense, you can check if a new release is available from the router's GUI itself and updating appears to be straightforward, either from the GUI or the console. -- Scott