[GTALUG] Debian Linux as-a-router Guide

[Scott Allen]

On Thu, 7 Sept 2023 at 11:33, Val Kulkov via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> I am curious what OpenWRT didn't provide that pfSense or OPNsense do provide.

I'm moving from DD-WRT to OPNsense (or maybe pfSense). One of the
primary reasons I'm doing so is for keeping the firmware up to date. With
all the "WRT" software (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, FreshTomato) there was always
something that made it difficult to maintain my router at a release
with the latest security fixes.

With DD-WRT it's hard to tell what the latest release to use is. It
seems the philosophy is "Try the latest. If it doesn't work, try
previous ones and/or discuss or report the problem".

With OpenWRT, it appears you have to re-install any manually installed
packages after a system upgrade. Another problem with OpenWRT is that
they seem to frequently up the minimum hardware requirements (flash
and RAM) and drop support for older hardware with low resources.

FreshTomato looks good for maintaining the latest firmware. However,
it's limited to Broadcom based systems. Because of this, I'm not sure
it will continue to be maintained in the long run.

With OPNsense, you can check if a new release is available from the
router's GUI itself and updating appears to be straightforward, either
from the GUI or the console.

--
Scott