 So, while doing some reading today, there was some craziness going on, so this started well just the other day. Yesterday at 12.30, there was a post in the PF Sense forums about someone who had purchased a third-party product and had some trouble configuring it because the admin password had changed not once, but twice, and then again. Now, this is where the controversy comes in, we'll start with how this works. You can buy, and they have a link to the Amazon product, which is right here. It's a PF Sense box, not from PF Sense, not from NetGate, the hardware company behind PF Sense. So, for those of you that don't know, PF Sense is an open source project, NetGate is the hardware that you can purchase directly from NetGate, comes preloaded to PF Sense. No one else is authorized per the way their agreement works to sell a product, hardware product, with it shipped on there. You can buy whatever hard you want. Matter of fact, I've reviewed these, and they even say right in here, no operating system, this is the protect teleboxes. You can load open Sense, PF Sense, or different other router software on here, uses kind of a standard set of hardware. I've done testing them, they work, but if you want the genuine thing with paid support and everything, you buy one from NetGate. Now, these companies are shipping PF Sense on there, in violation of the agreement. Also, if you get something from some random Chinese reseller that sells you something preloaded with that, aren't you just a little worried that maybe they put a back door in here? And that's essentially what this discussion turns into here, is all the things that the person went through and found some differences in some of the menus that he thought was really strange. So if you did not load it yourself, take time to erase it and load it. I'm sorry, don't even back out the XML file on it, because if you're exporting things from these, and you've already been using it, like, oh, crap, you should really be thinking about that. So you don't want some third party vendor. We take, if we use third party, and we have a few of these built inside of VMs, we've got these built on custom hardware for high-end clients that needed things like we built them with server motherboards. We loaded them from scratch. They did not come pre-installed or shipped. We have purchased the NetGate products for some of our client projects as well. Those ones we do not need to load, because they come certified from NetGate. Now, this is another thing. People always ask me about other firewalls, and I'm getting around to it. I want to test some more of them, yes. But the other firewalls, PF Sense, for the controversy that seems to be around them occasionally, which we'll get into in a second, they are a solid firewall company that has provided a product that protects enterprise networks. I know very large companies that my friends work IT for, they do not disclose publicly what firewalls they're using, but they have used PF Sense to connect their globally connected companies along with into their Amazon cloud services. I've even talked to when we did interviews at Microsoft and how much BSD they had to do, work they had to do, just to have more support for PF Sense in Azure. And because they couldn't give me a quote on the numbers, but they have a lot of people who run this as part of their virtualized infrastructure. So this is a very popular product. It's a very respected product with a big community and a lot of support, which is why I keep using it, I just I trust it. And I don't worry about any of the updates coming from the PF Sense people potentially breaking it because it's not like this is just for home use or a lab use. This is a lot of enterprise use. So you have to have a solid update process, which makes me slow to change or look at other firewalls because I have to kind of have a track record of them like these guys do and I've been using them for years. That being said, so let's get into where some of the craziness is going on right now over in Reddit. So, yes, there is a posting on Reddit and this is a further forked discussion on the PF Sense subreddit about that. And I'll leave a link to this in the description as well. And we have the folks from KnitGate. I forget his real name. I know he goes by Gonzo Paccio on here. Be the way, one of the developers. People directly related to the project. And this is where people apparently lost their mind. Now, I will not defend perhaps the less tactful nature that they handle things because when people have a lot of passion, if you know anyone who's really good at coding, you've probably met someone who's also, well, Linus like. Let's just say that if you read any Linus rants and things he has to say about things, the Linus as in the Linux kernel developer, you'll know that they're not necessarily interchangeable. People who are really good at it don't always have the best way of wording things. They may be brilliant code writers that we trust to write really good code. But people lost their mind because he said one of the options was essentially, well, we could always shut down the project and only allow our stuff. But I want to hear community feedback. And of course, you know, this is the line right here, invest time and resources in making sure that nobody can load PF since with all this internet gate. People apparently lost their minds 132 comments later. Then there's even more fork discussions. So if you follow here, you can follow all the fork discussions that went off of here, people just being super angry about all this. And there are some people on there that are even trying to fan the flames a little bit. The reality is I still trust PF Sense as a project. There's always going to be some, and man, there has been in the open source world in general. And only because it's open. This happens in probably closed source places as well. I've known my friends that work at code companies and the power struggles that go on between them that will never be publicly made of how some product was done. Those inside stories are baffling because they spent unproductive time arguing and this occurs in a much more open forum when things are posted on Reddit and GitHub for development. So you're going to see some of this. This is when people's passions go into things. I'm not trying to make any excuse for it. I think we can all always strive to communicate better with each other and not call each other names. While I joke that there's an entire sub Reddit dedicated to Linus Rantz on things that go on in a kernel, I don't think that's the best feature about him, that is an annoyance. Linus, I think he's a very smart guy who develops software who also has this annoying habit of berating people when things, this occurs a lot. Maybe occasionally they have these issues. Does that make them less available? No, this is just something that they need to work on. And the bigger picture that started all this though, when it comes to the hardware, and this is the beauty of open source, you can compile everything yourself. So you can start everything from source. We generally trust when we get a pre-compiled binary from companies like NetGate that they're solid, so to download it off their website, I feel comfortable with. What comes pre-installed on random routers you buy for inexpensive from China? That's a whole different issue. I don't trust any of that. So if I don't get the binary from the folks over at NetGate, I don't trust that install at PF Sense. And because we're putting these on networks and there's a lot of incentive to put spy boxes on places because a lot of people don't check, they buy it and just assume everything's good on there, that's a little worrisome when you buy from these weird third-party vendors like this one. So you see something that looks cool. And whatever, if you wanna buy this, I don't like the fact that these guys are violating the license. I don't recommend specifically this one. I have recommended it for third-party hardware. The protectellies are pretty nice. They come shipped with no OS. It's not hard to load PF Sense. I've got entire tutorials on it. It's not hard to load product. In the PF Sense community, it's always been big. It's always been supportive. I've always tried to be part of that community by making videos and sharing my knowledge of PF Sense. And I also encourage you to be gold members of this. I, if you can afford it, I'm gonna qualify that. Never give money away that you can't afford it. I mean, I can afford as a business owner who makes a few dollars, I don't mind donating to projects. I donate to several projects and donate money to open source projects and the open source tools I use. And one of those open source tools is PF Sense. They made it easy and I have a gold subscription myself that I've had for years. And I've made, I take that back. I made a single support phone call but it was actually on a piece of PF Sense hardware was an issue that I had overlooked one time. Part of it was I probably could have figured it out but didn't want to because it happened when I was at a client. It was because I did something stupid that I shouldn't have done. And they were able to fix it like within a few seconds of my phone call. So I've had a single support phone call but it was actually on a NetGate product but I've never used my gold subscription. I've been paying for it for a number of years too. But I don't mind. I don't feel as though it's wasted. As I see the PF Sense keep developing and keep making solid products that the updates have gone really well. I'm happy with it as a product. I'm gonna continue to use it because I trust it. And until such a time comes that it becomes an untrusted product. Well, there's other people out there and this is the beauty of open source. If these guys decide to actually do or act in the way that you perceived based on this, the craziness post of them thinking there you can just fork it. The source code's out there. This is what other companies done. And yes, I know everyone asked me about open sense. Yes, open sense people, they've forked it. If you like what they're doing, great. This is the beauty of open source. This is why we have in the Linux world, more than one desktop because there's a philosophy of the KDE which I'm using. There's the philosophy of the known folks. This is the beauty of it. If you don't agree with it and you have the fortitude to continue a project, go ahead. For now, I will continue with this project and recommending it. I might look at some other firewalls at some time. But a lot of my knowledge and a reason I have so much knowledge is because we are deploying these a lot and we are using their products and we have recommended a lot of IT companies that we consult with. They call us, what do you recommend? And we'll, oh yeah, go get in and put a PF Sense firewall at the head end of this. And I literally just an hour ago talked to a guy about this very thing. Talked about putting two PF Senses to help VPNist client. He's had some questions about how to set it up with some firewall mapping and similar stack that he's seen. That's consulting work we do and this is on the product stack we recommend because we know it, we trust it, it's a solid product. So that's kind of my opinion on this but if you want to do some reading on here but please, please, please, if the PF Sense has got some great ARM ones coming out if you're looking for something less expensive, they have a few options there. Also in this post, despite all the people are going losing their mind over here read the edit down here. This is the more important part and let me actually read this to you and this is how we'll end. Thanks to everyone for your feedback and attempt to offer instant, sorry. And an attempt to fend off even more drama. Let me say it again. So this is crystal clear. PF Sense is not going away. PF Sense is open source and we'll continue to remain open source. The situation is not about end users about those who put our trademark at risk because that's what a lot of us is about. You know, this is Gonzo Paccio putting people back on track but there's the other good news on here. They are talking about offering some more ARM stuff and some less expensive ARM stuff for home. So please read this, follow up on it. Share your opinion. Let me know what you think. This is interesting. I know cause some people get so passionate about this but the edits here, PF Sense is still open source. The code is available. If you would like to fork the code because you think you can do better than the PF Sense people, one daunting task but hey, if you're up for it, do it. Dude, go to GitHub, get the code, fork it, start a new project. This is the beauty of open source. So just don't over read things into one line out of all this paragraph and make some absolute assumptions that oh no, they're closing it and the product's falling and they're gonna destroy the community which is of course what there's, the sky is falling, people start below here. And I'm much more level headed and I just realized cause having work with people especially in the programming space, they're really smart people but they're not always the absolute clearest communicators and maybe they don't wear things right. Please tell me you know a couple of people like that in IT or programming. I've been into this industry for 22 years. I've met a lot of very unusual individuals. They're fascinating and fun communicators, they're not so not necessary. They're great coders though and that's what really is important that they write really good secure code. So thank you, share your thoughts below. Hopefully this clears it up and if you're buying it, any third party, load it yourself, don't trust anything that didn't come from NetGate preload of the PF Sense. So thanks for watching. If you'd like to count your links, write. If you need IT service consulting things, that's what we do as well. Check us out at lauranceystems.com. 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