Why you had chosen IPFire over other distris?

Getting Started with IPFire
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Hello at all,

After several years on IPFire and several years of OPNSense, i’m a little bit undecided to give IPFire another try or stay with OPNSense.

A lot of things were improved in IPFire, but a few things are still missed, like a live view of the logs or have more vlans on one interface or have more zones.

Let me know, why you have chosen IPFire over other firewall distributions?

Best regards
Gothic

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Because we’re setting all our hope on IPFire 3 :rofl: and we like the new forum here!
In comparison to others, it’s quite more often and faster updated, but why just using one distro if you may use more? I have devices running endian also.

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I didn’t know opnsense so I just tested it and it’s quite funny. The tui installer craches multiple times with “segmentation fault”. That bug i known since years but surely never fixed: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=7329.0

Also when you have to define your root password and your entry doesn’t match the installer says so, quits after about 1 seconds and the system reboots. After that the system can’t boot from its installation. Great thing! :rofl:

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4

I spent 6 months using and testing pfSense and could not figure out how to accomplish many simple things.

pfSense seemed to surface EVERY single config item and parameter. It was too overwhelming for me.

I had started with IPCop in 2006 or 2007 and it was an easy transition to IPFire.

Does this do what is needed?
https://ipfire:444/cgi-bin/zoneconf.cgi

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I will take this as a compliment. We are normally spending a lot of time and are having log debates on how to make the UI as intuitive as possible. Because if we were just converting every setting in a config file into a checkbox, then it probably would be easier to just edit the configuration file.

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Yes. BIG compliment!

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For me IPFire worked right off the bat, with pfSense I was having trouble setting it up. So I decided to go with IPFire.

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This is something I appreciate coming from opnsense. Ipfire is just easier to understand and the data I desire is in my face. Opnsense is a really ally great option and very powerful but there is something to be said for the simplicity you offer in ipfire. Things just flow and make sense.

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  • Intuitive and fast interface,
  • Easy to configure,
  • Documentation,
  • Was working on P3-based Celeron with not that much RAM (i’ve uprgraded after the blog post recommending to switch to 64bits),
    I’ve tried IPcop, OPNSense and Zeroshell as well, but I prefer IPFire for the reasons above. With the time, I noticed that I haven’t had any bug in 3 years despite the numerous updates.
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A couple of years ago I used pfSense for awhile and liked it a lot. At the time it had some advantages over ipfire in the IPS. For example, more customizations and it would save and retain ruleset customizations between ruleset updates. But the interface was harder to navigate and understand. IPFire had advanges with ease of use and Update Accelerator. There were some features that each had that the other didn’t but I didn’t use many of them so for me, it was a wash. What it came down to was a more intuitive UI. Both performed well and both were very effective firewalls. It comes down to personal preference IMO.

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Linux based and able to achieve 870Mb/s with IPS (12k rules) :sunglasses:

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Impressive collection of add-on that allows me to use IPFire as Like

  1. NAS (samba) + all network ports in an L2 bridge + STP
  2. N2N between locations + rsync for off site backup. I never/ever had a problem with N2N -> I simply forgot how many years are since I powered that up
  3. Guardian that blocks every brute force attempt
  4. CUPS running for years (same like N2N - I forgot how many years are since it runs)

And an enthusiastic team of people that added fucntionalities like Pi-Hole to IPFire, own Certificate Authority (that is now used on all IPFire I use), and last but not least the forum where I can find many ideas and solutions for things I need.

And all of that in APU boxes - low power comsumption, SSD based, great response speed…

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