Since the debacle where Electric Sheep Fence made their git repository private and gated access to it, it seems a fork has sprung up.. OPNsense.

I found out about it when I was searching for simple firewall alternatives which could run on a wifi/ADSL custom firmware, as I’d like to get some of my less-tech family and friends over to more secure environments, but which still don’t require a dedicated server or firewall host.  During my research, I found this page at the m0n0wall site saying the program had shut down, and recommending pfSense and OPNsense.

It looks so far like the developers are reasonably active for OPNsense, and the blog post about the latest release actually has some nice architectural changes in it in terms of aligning with freeBSD development.

Read more here:  https://opnsense.org/opnsense-version-15-1-10-released/

The upshot of it is that it sounds like one of their core goals is to remain closer in-step with the freeBSD releases, and also to be able to feed back to the freeBSD development process, which is IMO a great goal.

I’ll be trying OPNsense in a test VM and will see if I can get my VPN setup up and running in it, all of course, under Xen!

Ooroo.