 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and on October 25th of 2023, PF Sense decided to remove the home and lab licenses that were free that they said at some point would cost $129 and they're not available anymore if you want to take your PF Sense CE edition to PF Sense Plus. Now, because these were available for quite a while, many of you did upgrade. Well, sometimes at my request going, hey, we should probably use that PF Sense Plus. But since they changed things, I'm now making a video on how to go back to PF Sense CE 2.7. So if you're using PF Sense Plus 23.05.1, the latest version or any of the PF Sense Plus versions that are prior to this, I don't know what they're going to do in the future. You're not running on NetGate hardware, because this does not affect you if you're running NetGate hardware and you want to move back to PF Sense CE 2.7. This is the video for you. I wanted to make a clear path for those of you that would like to roll back, so to speak. Well, just reinstall and use CE 2.7, but not have to reconfigure everything, because that's obviously a really important point. I'll leave a forum link down below. That is where you can find all the information on the license change and all the discussion that is ongoing on it. And Payton, who knows, maybe in the future they've changed just when you're watching this, but for those of you that are just looking for a path and for myself, I was out of compliance. I found with my lab system, since this license doesn't exist. I rolled mine back to PF Sense CE and this is what that video is to show you how to do. Let's get started. Now, we're logged into my virtualized environment. This is NetGate PF Sense Plus. You notice that the BIOS vendor is Zen. This is our lab system. Now, there is no more lab license as of today. Therefore, I'm going to go ahead and revert this back to the PF Sense CE 2.7. First step is just going to diagnostics and making a backup of all the configuration settings in here. And this does include all the package data. So we're going to download that configuration as XML. Next step is reloading PF Sense. That'll bring us back to the main menu. And because I'm coming at this from the WAN side, you can just run PF CTL TACD and this will allow you to disable the firewall to get back to the main WAN without having to get through the LAN. Just an easy way for the way I'm setting it up. Just a little pro tip for anyone building it in a lab and would like to do this. Once you're back to the login screen, whether you're on WAN or LAN, it doesn't matter, admin PF Sense because remember, this is a brand new clean default install and we want to restore our config. We can skip the wizard and jump right over to diagnostics, backup restore, choose the file and hit restore configuration. Now, a problem I've run into sometimes is when you do this restore, it does not restore the packages themselves. The details of the packages are there if you manually reinstall them. But because the packages are missing, you can simply just restore again a second time and all the packages will just show back up and be reinstalled. When it reboots a second time, you will get a notice that the packages are locked depending on the speed of your internet connection because it has to download them all and how fast the system is. You'll just have to wait till this gets finished. On my system, it only took about three or four minutes. And once it's done, you get a package reinstalled process finished and you are ready to use PF Sense CE with all the settings and everything copied over. One last detail for how we do things in our lab, we do anytime we have something in a virtual environment, make sure we have the description that matches what it is. So now this matches that it says PF Sense CE 2.7 and we let other people using the lab know it's on Wamport 5555. Now that's all you have to do to convert back to PF Sense CE or Community Edition from the PF Sense Plus. All your settings are there, just like I showed in the video, it's a pretty simple process. Now for those of you and probably there's comments already before you got this far in the video being added of how do I convert to Open Sense? Now just because they both export XML does not mean they're a hundred percent compatible and you just can't import that XML file from one or the other. So you can't go from Open Sense to PF Sense and you can't go from PF Sense to Open Sense just using the XML file. But XML is somewhat human readable, depending on your skill level of reading it. You could just take the rules and figure out how to manipulate them in there. If someone knows of a converter that already does this, hey, reach out to me. I'd be interested in talking about it because a quick search didn't yield one and it's a popular topic and popular question. Speaking of topics and questions, head over to my forums, there's a discussion link you'll find on this exact topic and I'm going to add this video to the end of it to keep the discussion going. It's a great place if you know of tools or have comments and concerns around it, that's a great place to engage with it because as we all know, the YouTube comment system is less than wonderful. Speaking of that, like and subscribe though. It does help the YouTube algorithm to suggest more videos that are of your liking that I make and I greatly appreciate it. Reach out to me in the forums or whatever socials you can find me on at lornsystems.com. All right, and thanks.