On 21/09/11 16:34, Bart Grefte wrote:
Hmm, why switch to pfSense from Linux? I am considering the other way round, from pfSense to Linux. Mainly because the lack of wireless drivers with support for N and a buggy Atheros FreeBSD driver.
I don't need wireless drivers - this is handled by wireless routers around the company. It doesn't surprise me that Linux has better support than FreeBSD for wireless drivers - they were notoriously poor in Linux until recently, and wireless card manufacturers who barely acknowledged the existence of Linux will not have heard of FreeBSD.
Right know I'm thinking a base install of Debian, followed by only the packages I need and do the configuring by console. I know about Webmin, but don't know if I can change every setting with that.
The router I have at the moment is Debian, and I've configured by hand (i.e., from the console). I'm not looking to move away from Linux as such, but looking towards using pfSense.
I doubt if there is anything significant that can be done with FreeBSD and pfSense that cannot be done with Linux. But the point is that with pfSense, there is so much that comes ready-to-use. With Linux, I could certainly use iptraf, rrd, php, etc., and show nice graphs of network traffic. With pfSense it is already there as a page on the web interface. And while /I/ can write the firewalling and routing rules I want in an iptables script, others at my company cannot - but they could, if necessary, use the web interface (such as if I'm on holiday).
If you want to use Linux, you might also consider some of the dedicated distributions such as Smoothwall or OpenWRT (I use OpenWRT on small routers). There are also firewall tools such as vuurmuur and shorewall. I found that none of them had all the features I needed, so I worked manually. (I also found that pfSense didn't have those features either, when I first looked at it many years ago.)
In the end it depends on what you need. Both Linux and FreeBSD are solid bases for a firewall/router.
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