 Time here for more on systems and big changes are coming for both PF Sense Community Edition and PF Sense Plus. They're going to be moving from FreeBSD 12 stable to the current version 14 of FreeBSD as a base operating system. PF Sense is going to be moving to PHP 8.1. Currently, they're using 7.4, but that reaches end of life around November of 2022. And PF Sense Plus version 22.11 will be coming out in November as well. Now, there's not a time stamp, so to speak, yet for when the new CE version will come out. But I'm positive because these are being developed simultaneously that it will come out probably around then. But I can't absolutely say that they've always been vague about exactly when the releases will be done. They get done when they get done. That's kind of how you tell that they're driven more by the developers and less by the marketing team who would like to put dates and times on everything. Now the PF Sense Plus version, even if they're minor incremental changes, they do seem to come out on a regular cadence because they're just trying to stick to setting goals and moving them forward. But for those of you that think CE is dead or there's no more development on it, CE is getting the same under the hood maintenance as the Plus version. So feel free to leave your comments on how this will be the last time they update CE just like a year ago when they came out with Plus. And people said the same thing that CE was dead, but yet we've seen more versions, more updates and more features get added to it. All right, I'll get off the soapbox and that let's talk about the details. All right, so let's go over here to their blog post. PF Sense is moving ahead. Now the PHP 8.1 is kind of an obvious choice because well, 7.4 is reaching end of life, which means no more security updates. 8.1 will be supported all the way until 2024. So that gives a nice long life from the base things on. There's also a lot of changes when you go from 7.4 to 8.1. And if you're done any software, it took well a long time before some packages, not just to the PF Sense world, but just in general PHP packages would support 8.1. It held a lot of things back. So I know this change is not insignificant. Once you spent years developing on a particular version, this may break, things were not supported in eight or different changes that were made to the product meant you can't just drop it in because it's a new version and 100% backwards compatible because it's not. So I realize this is a big heavy lift in terms of the developers. Also of note available inter documentation for the community developers and package maintainers, those who maintain your packages that work with them, they're making this notice to let them know that yes, this is going to be a thing. You're going to have to deal with this. A few years ago when there was an update to get them to 7.4, this definitely had some issues and breakage and packages. So yeah, this is not going to be an easy task for all parties involved. There's going to be a lot of coding, a lot of testing and a lot to do. Now them moving to free BSD main 14, not just about skipping over the unlucky number, what they want to do is get the latest edition. So if you're going to do the heavy lift of getting it out of 12, why go to 13 when you can jump all the way to 14? Because well, this is where the latest code contributions are. That being said, this is going to be one of those things that is really important for the team over at net gate. And furthermore, as neck gate continues to upstream our own custom changes to BSD, we can take advantage of the submissions while lowering our technical debt. This is something really important. I want to dwell on net gate spends a lot of time contributing to the free BSD packages, not just specifically for PF sense, but everyone benefits from this. And I say it like that because an easy example would be the Intel two and a half gig network drivers Intel doesn't care about free BSD day for day did not have a driver package for it. But the team over at net gate wrote the two and a half gig driver package that offers the more modern Intel card support. Now this was pushed into PF sense, but it was also pushed into the BSD kernel, which means everyone who has BSD based operating systems get to benefit from this added support. This is a really important thing. So by moving all the way to the current as they submit these changes, it's just going to be a little bit easier for them because they're getting submitted to the latest version of BSD, but not old 12 BSD. So they then port them back in and because they're working with the same team because they're contributing this code to the upstream and I'm pulling and putting it in there instead of just keeping themselves and putting it all open source. There's a lot of nuance to that. This is going to help remove some of that technical debt and hopefully get these things done faster for them with generally less coding overhead. And the last piece I want to mention here is the noteworthy considerations. Free BSD makes an effort to maintain compatibility between kernels and kernel modules, such as those from packages built with versions of free BSD in the same major version. This binary compatibility is due to the kernel ABI API not changing often, if at all. In this way, ABI API is stable. Hence the use of that term in free BSD branch names. Following the main branch of BSD can introduce rapid changes to kernel API API, but this is not a concern at all for the PSS software. Each version of PF Sense is built with a whole set of base and add on packages all from the same source at the same time. Netgate does not offer binary packages available with multiple versions. And this is a topic that comes up from time to time when people are asking questions about when someone builds something as an appliance such as PF Sense and what they do or do not include because you have the team pulling from the source and cutting it down and making it exact for the appliance. Those concerns become, well, a lot less. This isn't just a PF Sense thing. This goes for any project that builds based on an open source operating system into appliance. They're not loading the tooling on top of a base installer for EBSD. They're very much customizing it. And that's what leads to a better experience overall. So I've had people mention why didn't they add this or why didn't they add these other things so I can add more customization. Recently I did a talk and where people were asking me, why don't they have a full compiler suite inside of your PF Sense appliance? And I'm like, well, yeah, they probably did make that a little bit harder to integrate and they didn't include all the binaries you need to compile everything on there. Someone was talking about building from source the extra packages they want right within the PF Sense. I'm like, you're going far outside of the system. The system is generally speaking really supposed to be monolithic to minimize your threat surface for one, two, make sure you have the best experience and especially in our firewalls, we want a very, very, very stable experience. So I'm not bothered by the longer time between releases and the extra QA that goes in between those releases. This is one of those things. If you have a lot of firewalls deployed and you have them managing a lot of businesses such as I do, you want absolutely security first, stability, and of course not too frequent updates unless they're absolutely needed. And as it comes to security, they've always been on top of it and offered it into my release if there's some type of security bug or flaw needed in there. And the packages can be updated independent of the main system. And they've still continued to add features such as tail scale, which I did a video on links down below. So I think that's a really cool feature they added to both CE and plus recently. So it's not like development isn't happening. It's just happening at the standard careful space that we would like them to do it when it comes to building firewalls. So leave comments down below on what you think of CE and plus and head over to their blog post for all the details and maybe something I skipped over. Share your thoughts down below. We're heading over to my forums for a more in depth discussion. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you'd like to hire a short project, head over to laurancesystems.com and click the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts, and offers, check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. And finally, our forums. Forums.LauranceSystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel. Thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you.