 Tom here from Orange Systems, and it is currently February of 2022. I want to start with the date to add the context about whether or not you should get PF Sense Plus. There's a few different options that come with PF Sense Plus, well, a few additional plus tools compared to the Community Edition. I wanted to explain the differences and clear up some of the confusion, but the date matters because these are the features it has now and there will probably be more features in the future. So let's go back in time to January of 2021 when they announced PF Sense Plus. And there was a little bit of confusion because people thought they were forked in the whole project and not, this is not really what's going on. What they did do was they have the CE Community Edition, and then they took the FE or Factory Edition that shipped with NetGate Hardware and decided that they were going to call it PF Sense Plus. So if you own or have purchased NetGate Hardware, that's the version, the Factory Edition that's loaded on there. Now, back then it didn't have too many differences. It was pretty much the same product, but when they moved forward and all the way here in February of 2022, there's a few more things that kind of got picked up along the way. Now, right now they are offering it to be switched for regular hardware, like if you built your own PF Sense and you wanted to switch it, which is of course why the comment is now coming up of actually switching to it because before you could only get it within NetGate Hardware and that's where some of that confusion. So you can take your current PF Sense CE or Community Edition install and convert it to a PF Sense Plus. But why would you do that? That's probably the first thing you're asking. Now, let me break down the details of exactly what goes into this and also clear up, hopefully a little confusion and basically explain what PF Sense Plus is. And kind of like its name implies, PF Sense is the Community Edition, the open source firewall that we're familiar with, PF Sense, plus some additional tools that are not part of the open source repository. So if you would like to not have a firewall that has any type of code in it that has been added on by the company that actually writes the software, you can stay with the Community Edition. So for those of you that are looking for the pure CE edition, that still exists. And despite when PF Sense Plus came out and PF Sense 2.5 was released at the time when people said that was the end, there would never be a 2.6. It'll just never happen. Feel free to go through all the comments. I see them on YouTube and Reddit. Someone's always going to say that. And now they're going to tell me that the PF Sense 2.6 is probably the last version, etc. Someone actually already messaged me that they don't have a complete roadmap for 2.7. Therefore, that's their proof that 2.6 is the last version. Anyways, I'm not here to speculate any of that, but I would bet pretty confidently there's still going to be Community Edition going forward and the plus add-ons because plus is based on the Community Edition with some extra add-ons to it. And that's how they're going to go forward at NetGate as part of their business model. Now, what do you get right here in February of 2022 is OpenVPN Import Tool, QAT Crypto, the new ZFS widget that actually just came in the last update, AWS VPN Wizard, IPsec Export for Apple Profiles and IPsec Export for Windows PowerShell. Now, like the IPsec and AWS one, those have been around a long time. Those are part of the factory edition and then was converted over to plus. Now, when they announced plus in January 2021, I was excited, hoping for the business level dashboard and multi-tenant support because me as an IT business owner, who has a lot of these deployed at our clients, we were hoping to get, you know, a cool dashboard. I think they're still working on it. I don't know where they're at with it. At least they threw it out there that it's something that they have on their roadmap and it's something they have as a goal. And to me, that's a huge plus feature to pay for. And hey, I hope that really does come out. I know it takes time to write something like that because it takes a lot of tooling because PF Sense was not really from the get-go designed to be like multi-tenant managed in that way. But it's just the way things have gone. The market has changed and this project's been around a long time and it's amazing that it's been kept up as well as it has. And it's still a personal favorite firewall of mine. Now, the other very important features that come with the PF Sense plus now that you can convert in place is the ability to get their tax support. So you can get the TAC Lite, you can get the TAC Pro, you can get the TAC Enterprise and these are different levels of support that can be purchased from PF Sense. Now currently, and once again, we'll say the date again is February of 2022 in case you're seeing something different in the future. The TAC Lite is $0 for the first year. Well, it says $0 per year. I'm imagining at some point they're going to be because they have a little crossed out there, $1.29 a year in the future. So you can convert your self-built PF Sense system in there and still get their TAC Lite support. Then we have their TAC Pro at $3.99 per year. Their TAC Enterprise at $7.99 per year. Now, I didn't forget, but we do have the home or lab options. Those are pretty cool for those home users that would like to use it and take advantage of those extra PF Sense tools that you can get. This is great if you want to register and they're offering it for free. They know that people at Nekate are very aware of the community and the community is a massive feedback loop. They work on projects. People have different scenarios. People discuss it over on Reddit or in the forums over at Nekate. The team over at Nekate, the very large team there, looks at what the community is doing and they do a lot of work and engaging back and forth. And this is how you come up with some of the better ideas and use cases and things and helps them understand that's why they do their surveys every year, what things people would like to see. And so this still all goes into the community edition, but they are a business and this is where people want to buy support. Matter of fact, specifically, if you work in the enterprise space, as I do, you'll find a lot of companies. It's not even something that can get past a little checklist of for a bid. They can't just buy a firewall because it's free. Firewalls have to have support with them, have to have different type of SLA agreements. And this is something a lot of large companies look at. This isn't just a firewall or PF sense thing. This is a checklist that a lot of large enterprise companies have. Because yes, open source is used Germanically way more than people really realize in the enterprise world. But this is what makes companies like Red Hat so big is selling support packages. Come back to specifically on topic here with PF sense. That's what they're offering is the ability for people to go, I like this hardware. I want to load this hardware that I have in our data center, our rack, wherever it is, and we're going to keep our hardware. But we'd like to get that SLA support enterprise agreement. And I will tell you 799 a year is not a bad price for an enterprise support agreement. So this is one of the offerings they have. You can convert your in place system and buy that enterprise support if you want. Now, if you're a home user, you just want these extra features. You can register and it's free, like I said. And so there's a whole gamut here of options for you to choose. But if none of that's interested in you, if you're just going, you know, I just want to keep using the CE edition, absolutely go ahead and do so. For those of you that want to go a little further and are curious about it. The process is really simple to go ahead and switch your system in place. It does require a reboot, but it doesn't require a reload. If you would like to migrate it from PF sense, CE community edition 2.6 and convert it to the 22.1 PF sense plus, it's really easy. Now you start by going over to the net gate site. You're going to buy a home or lab license or one of the tack licenses, all the different options they have there, pick the one that works for you. Once you purchase this, and if you're just using the home one, it has no cost. It will go through the checkout process. No credit card required, nothing more than an email address because they have to send you the activation key. Once they send you this activation registration key, you're going to go over into PF sense, you're going to click over on system. Then you're going to go to register, then you're going to paste in that activation token. Once you paste it in and save, then you can go to updates, choose the PF sense plus branch. It'll download some packages, doesn't take long to do. It'll do a reboot. And now you have PF sense plus. That's it. Now, what if you have to go back? What if you want to go back to PF sense CE because you go, I'm not dealing with this registration thing. This isn't for me. You're not interested in any support. Like I said, you can still go back to the CE. You do. If you go through this process, we'll probably have to reload your system. I didn't see any way to in place do it, but don't worry. It's really easy to reload PF sense. Go ahead and just download it again. And the backup files, the backup config files are the same in PF sense plus and CE. So you can flip flop between them. Matter of fact, if you have to reload your system because the hard drive dies or something like that, you can take that backup file from your PF sense plus, reload the CE edition. That's currently the process they have here in February of 2022. Maybe there'll be a future date when they have a direct download for the PF sense plus. But nonetheless, you just go through download, load PF sense CE, get the activation token, convert it back to PF sense plus. And overall, I think they've made this whole process clean and simple, easy. And by the way, you're not forced into doing this. I like the extra support options you can get. I like the extra features you can get with plus. I like the fact that there's still the community edition. And despite last year when someone, well, many someone's were saying 2.5 was the end of the roadmap. And now they're saying 2.6 is the end or 2.7 is the end, et cetera. I don't believe it. I still think they're going to keep continuing with the community edition. It's been a long time they've been doing it. And I see them doing it for a long time in the future. If NETGATE changes and they become some horrible, awful company. Well, I won't be doing videos about it no more. And I will change my mind as well. If new information becomes available, not speculative, theoreticals and hypotheticals on theoreticals of all the things that could go wrong. And yes, some people are pessimists and seem to think they're going down the path of the dark side, but I don't think they are. I think they're keep contributing back to the community and keep, you know, this product rolling and offering quite a bit, you know, look at the whole way or guard project that's happened last year. And it's a great integration. And there's undoubtedly more great things that are coming to the community edition on the way and probably plenty more things that are becoming to the plus edition add-ons. And I'm looking forward to the business add-ons that I would love to see like those dashboards and things that I mentioned. But either way, leave your comments down below. Let me know what your thoughts are. If you love it, you hate it, you don't know where the company's going. But overall, I feel positive about this. I'm also very optimistic that everything I've dealt with and talked to it, people at NETGATIVE, it's been an overall positive experience of where they're trying to take things, keep their business going and keep the open source project going and contributing back. Overall, as long as they're doing that, I'm going to keep supporting them. If that ever changes, I won't. You'll see a ranty YouTube video about it. 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