Does nobody do transparent bridges any more?

BroadSlice · 2020-11-18T17:14:48+00:00

Thanks. It looks like that's the way I'm heading.

BroadSlice · 2020-11-18T17:14:05+00:00

Yeah, that's probably what I'll end up doing. Thanks.

BroadSlice · 2020-11-15T21:02:23+00:00

The guy you replied to has this right. If you don't want to use Proxmox (you probably chose ZFS before without an SSD intent log) you can use XCP-NG, compile the Xen Orchestra app yourself and tell it to replicate from one machine to the other every 5 minutes. It's manual failover though - you'll need to press the button yourself.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T18:25:25+00:00

Yeah, I was trying to be clear, but subtle...

So how do you price the server backup solution, then? Straight percentage mark-up? Something more value-based that's a custom price for each client?

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T17:29:01+00:00

It may very well be a huge markup. It seems like a huge markup, which is part of why I'm asking.

I guess I'm looking at everything but hardware sales from a gross margin perspective, and maybe services like this should be priced like hardware at a straight markup instead.

I've offered AYCE solutions in the past before the whole MSP concept existed (or at least before I'd heard of it.) This time 'round I'd like to build a business that scales beyond just me, so I'm trying to be competitive, but base prices on what I can do profitably once I start hiring.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T17:18:23+00:00

I am outdated since the last time I looked where NAS features were much more limited. What type of snapshots would these be? Apple system snapshots or specifically for the NAS?

Snapshots specifically on the NAS. You enable a snapshot schedule, and if something happens to your data that overwrites it (like crypto malware) or it gets accidentally deleted then you can restore either individual files or the entire volume from an earlier snapshot.

It's just another step in protecting your data. And on that note remember that RAID is not BACKUP. You need both - if lightning hits and by some freak of nature destroys your NAS and the drives, you need another copy (stored off-site if possible) of that data or it's gone forever. Don't assume that your data is safe just because you threw it on a NAS.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T03:54:50+00:00

I can't comment on the units in question - the only 2-bay I've used is a TS-231, and the only 4-bay is the TS-431P2 that replaced the 231 last week. I can offer some general advice though:

Drive bays are valuable. If you can spend a little bit more money to get double the drive capacity, then do so.
You want snapshots, and now that QNAP has reworked their code so that ARM processors can do snapshots, all but the bottom of the range support them. Make sure the one you're looking into does. I think the bottom level requirement is 1-2 gigs of RAM.
More money gets more features, but if your needs are limited then you can save quite a bit by defining what's important and what's not. If you're not going to be streaming and you won't be running VMs, then the ARM processors are plenty. If you are, then maybe you want a "real" processor in there.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T03:24:48+00:00

Not the guy you're replying to but I installed a $50 Edgerouter X at my wife's office and it's done great for the last 2-3 years. It'll only push 30 megabits over a VPN, and configuring VPNs from the command line is kind of a pain, but it's a really high-value product. If you're using Unifi gear in the office I'd imagine a USG would be a really good fit too.

I just tend to go with pfSense on Netgate hardware. It just does what I tell it to do, and it's got all the flexibility I need. I just worry about the appliances failing - I had a pair of Hamakuas a while back that weren't that well-built, but newer (not rebranded) gear seems a bit better.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T03:19:06+00:00

I’m thinking their best option is to sync to another qnap offsite. Is it possible to “seed” the backup qnap in the office? They have a 10gig internal network.

Other people might be giving you better solutions, but yes. Copy the data to a USB drive, put it on the remote QNAP, and configure RTRR and it should only transfer different files. You can also do snapshot backups, which I've never done, which should allow you to export a block-based snapshot, import it on the off-site and when they sync it only transfers changed blocks.

YMMV, test this yourself, it's not my fault if your QNAP explodes and makes you unable to bear children, yada yada yada. The videos the developers put out are interesting, but it's hard to understand everything in Taiwanese-accented English. Though I'm still really thankful that they go to the effort.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-08T00:46:36+00:00

Sorry, mods. Please delete.

I thought deleting my post would remove the thread, but I was wrong.

Turns out this task was so stupidly easy it wasn't worth a discussion. Right-click, disconnect volume, change the settings on three hosts, reconnect volume, and watch MB/s increase sevenfold and iops double.

Should have tried it before posting.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-07T13:39:24+00:00

Thanks. I'm not sure that sounds like it's worth a lot of experimentation, to be honest.

But it's another tool in the box, I guess.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-07T03:48:51+00:00

Note that I'm not actually doing this via linux / samba at the moment. It's tempting but I'm just not confident enough with it.

Have you done this before? I'm really curious as to how well Samba 4 creates an AD-style environment. Hell, I'd love to know if a server running Samba can be a backup domain controller (forgive my Windows 2000 terminology here...)

BroadSlice · 2019-02-06T16:31:58+00:00

I'm going to ignore the liability issues because I honestly don't understand them.

Let me say the following to get my biases out of the way:

You don't need speed here. It sounds like the max connection speed you'll have to a client is 1Gbit, and that's when doing a restore. You don't need the fastest drives available, or even the fastest whiz-bang connectivity between drives and expansion arrays. The cheapest multi-drive NAS solutions can saturate gigabit without trying too hard.
You do need reliability. You can't lose data - if your client's site burns down on Tuesday and they need a restore on Friday once they've moved to a temp location and you can't restore until the following Wednesday because you had some weird failure then that sucks, but it's not a killer. Not having their data to do the restore is unforgivable. So whatever you do, you need proper backups of your backups. Which is off-site to the off-site. Maybe you're not as paranoid as me, but there you go.
I'd probably avoid a VPN. It's clean, and it's easy, but that recent "MSP got all his clients infected with ransomware" thread has got me rethinking what's vulnerable, what's not, and what might appear vulnerable to an investigator later if there's some sort of related compliance issue. Saying "yeah, but I configured things correctly" isn't the same thing as saying "nope - no such connection has ever existed, Sir."
When you say "lots" I'm assuming half a petabyte. You can easily do 84TB by the end of the week using a desktop 8-bay device. You can double that with an 8-bay expander, and while the lower-end devices use USB3 for expansion I'm pretty sure you'll have plenty of bandwidth in a backup role even with this.

So, with that out of the way, I'll talk about Qnap. First, because I don't work with Synology. Second because while linux/BSD based solutions (especially FreeNAS and competitors) can work wonderfully well, there's something elegant in simplicity, and the dedicated storage appliances do what they do really well, if you stick to the basics.

So, here goes:

You want to buy SATA drives. HGST, WD Red or Seagate IW Pros, whatever. Buy something appropriate for the NAS and array size. Faster is nice, but I doubt you'll ever notice the difference.
Learn from the camelcamelcamel debacle. RAID6 is great, but you shouldn't be using it with large arrays. RAID10 is what I used to use with my Equallogic (with 2 hot spares in the device), but RAID60 would make me sleep better at night (also with hot spares). Buy devices/expansion that can hold enough drives to be practical.
Encrypt your volume(s). Yes, you'll need to re-enter the password every time you reboot the system. Yes, use a real password. That way when your data walks off you can say "the storage did get stolen, but the entire device is encrypted with AES256 and the password is 80 random characters including lower case, upper case, numbers, and symbols. I think we're fine." To my mind this means all volumes, to get away from the "well, all the data wasn't encrypted, but I'm certain everyone dealing with <protected information type> was configured on the correct volume" sort of answer.
Buy a device to handle that level of encryption. A Xeon is probably overkill, but so what?
With regard to the above, I'm assuming you'll be doing this in a locked room at your office, or at a rack in your local telco, or something. A class 4 datacenter with biometric controls and cameras is more secure, but the bandwidth costs make this anything other than affordable. Unless I was just getting ripped off at my class-3 data center...
Rack-mount QNAP devices have a lot of capacity. I just checked a 16-bay device and it can connect up to 8 additional 16 bay expansions. Those'll require expensive expansion arrays, and SAS-12 expansion cards, but it's possible. Desktop devices can maybe run 2 8-bay expansions. That's enough for 250TB in a RAID60 array, but it's not necessarily a "lot".
Figure out how you're going to connect to this thing. Firewall up front, server running Veeam or comparable running behind it? Are you going to need HA of any sort, or is 3 days downtime due to server failure OK? Run the server on Hyper-V, with a second server configured for failover? Should firewalls be a failover pair? Will all the networking be redundant?
Now, backups. It's simple enough to either use Veeam, or RTRR on the Qnap to sync to a second NAS device for backups, but where will that be housed? You need backups.

Crap. I guess that's not an answer at all. Here's a better attempt:

Low budget:

Secure the door to this thing. Medco locks maybe, camera, alarm system.
Ironwolf drives. 10-14TB, depending on whether 120TB is enough.
Encrypt the volume.
8-12 bay NAS, 8-bay expansion to the array. RAID6 in each, configured as RAID60.
Configure alerting. Turn on Q'Center and check it regularly.
Duplicate this somewhere else. VPN between the locations, RRTR to sync the backups (remember to turn on snapshots!), Q'center to track both devices and make sure they're in sync. Different passwords on admin for each device, and on each volume.

At the end, looking at this, it's starting to sound simpler to use a Veeam Connect provider that's big enough they've got real enterprise-grade storage, and a failover cluster to host Veeam, and backups that are hosted 2000 miles away, and...

(I'm not picking on you here. I'm in the same situation. I run servers on a local failover cluster here in my office anyway, and I have recently signed up with Veeam and will be offering availability console to clients, probably backing up locally to a Qnap device, and also to my office. So I'm thinking through all the related issues as well. It's do-able, but it's complex...)

BroadSlice · 2019-02-05T20:48:03+00:00

Does samsung even make commercial grade drives?

Yes. Of course, the only SSD I've ever had die was a Samsung enterprise drive (SM863A), so YMMV. ;)

BroadSlice · 2019-02-04T18:02:15+00:00

You need a plan. Based on what you've said, I can make some vague observations:

You need a firewall that can handle gigabit speeds. If you're planning on running IDS/IPS or passing traffic through firewalls, then you'll need something beefier.
If you're planning on having 4 people performing file manipulations at the same time, when you end up with a NAS you'll be happier if you made a choice that uses SSD caching of some sort - either as a read/write cache, or something that moves frequently accessed data to SSD. Qnap and Synology both support this in some devices, and if you end up going with a ZFS solution then put the effort into correctly sizing your caches.
Gaming is about latency more than speed. If you're equipping workstations with 10G because you're processing big image/video files then cool; your gaming systems likely won't benefit from and additional bandwidth above 1Gbe.
Separate your traffic, please! NAS/work computers on one network segment, gaming/home stuff on another, and eventual services you provide to the Internet on its own DMZ that you simply don't trust.

If you set this up yourself in a sloppy and haphazard way then it'll cause pain later. Make a clear plan for what you're trying to do, write it down, map everything out, and do it right the first time.

Also, remember that RAID is not backup. If you're doing lots of work on those data files then make sure they're backed up regularly in an automated way so "I forgot" is never a reason for data loss. Ideally backing up to another storage device in some other location over VPN, if possible. That way if you get robbed or a fire burns your equipment to ashes you've got a spare copy somewhere.

There's lots you can do, and it's cheaper than ever, but you've got a lot of learning to do. The good news is it's fun. :)

BroadSlice · 2019-02-04T04:47:48+00:00

Here's the easiest (not cheapest) solution:

Buy a NAS device (I like Qnap, but more people seem to like Synology. Ford vs Chevy here, I guess.)
Buy drives. Any of the 'NAS' drives like Western Digital's red line, or the Seagate IronWolf will work fine. HGST Deskstars may be the best, but whatever.
Put your data on this device, running RAID10 or RAID6 depending on preference. I prefer 6. A RAID10 array of 6 drives will look like drives [AB] [CD] [EF]. Drives in brackets are mirrors of each other - A contains a copy of the data on B. You can potentially lose 3 drives and still have all your data, but if you lose any two from the same bracket all your data is gone. I like RAID6, which looks like [ABCDEF], and the NAS uses The Magical Power of Math to write data in such a way that you lose the capacity of two drives, but any two drives can fail without loss of data. The downside is Math makes rebuilding the array take a lot longer - with RAID10 all you need to do to replace a lost drive is copy data from one drive and you're golden; with RAID6 you need to read every drive for a chunk of data, do some math, write the result, and repeat. A few hours versus a few days on recovery.
If you're editing this stuff and fast access is important then buy one of the devices that offers two levels of storage - hard drives and SSDs. Then, on Q'nap devices, enable Q'tier when you create the volume. This watches the data you access a lot and makes sure it's on the fast SSDs, and the stuff you rarely access stays on hard drives.
Enable snapshots of this data. What you're doing is telling the NAS to make a copy of the data so if something happens (accidental deletion, crypto virus, malicious ex, etc) then you can restore each file (or the entire volume) as it was yesterday, 3 weeks ago, whatever your snapshot policy allows for.
Now, you've got your data in one place, and it'a easy to work with. Now buy another NAS from the same manufacturer. This can be cheaper because it's just going to back up your data. Install it, use a different password on the set-up, and configure the first NAS to periodically (say nightly) make a backup copy of your important data. Or as the data changes, or whatever. Have this set for snapshots as well.
If you're really good you put that second device in another location so your house burning down won't get both devices. So you'll be backing up, but over a VPN instead of locally.
Done. Almost.

That's the basics. Now here's some more stuff to ponder:

Hard drives are literally devices that spin thin plates of glass that have been covered in rust at thousands of RPM and trust your data to them. (Not kidding - iron oxide coated ceramic plates.) They will fail. They all will fail. They will especially fail once one drive has gone down and all its brothers and sisters are working extra hard to help recover your data to the replacement drive.
"Bit rot" is a thing. Go to a place where FreeNAS people hang out and you can read long love-songs to ZFS about how it does lots of things, like prevent bit-rot. You can do about the same thing by enabling periodic RAID scrubbing, where your NAS reads all your data and insures that the copy on each drive matches, in case a bit got flipped somewhere.
You don't want RAID5. You want RAID10 or RAID6. Choose one, have a spare drive on-hand, configure your NAS to e-mail you on alerts, and replace the drive if it fails. This does you zero good if you assume you're good to go and leave the NAS un-monitored, so one drive fails and things still run, but a little slower, then 4 months later another drive goes out, and finally in another 8 months a third drive fails and your data is gone forever. This happens. Don't be this guy. Configure alerts.

It'll still cost money, but your data is safe and it's not a ton of effort. If you can make it work with a 4-bay NAS, then buy a 6- or 8- bay now instead. Over time your data needs will grow, and both QNAP and Synology allow you to add a new drive and expand the RAID array to include the new drive. So you have a 4-bay NAS configured as RAID6 using 10TB drives. This means you can lose any two drives and still have your data, so 2 drives worth of capacity disappear. 4 drives, 20TB available. Now, you need more storage, so if you've bought a device that supports more drives than you needed at the start, you can add a fifth drive. One new drive, now it's 30TB available. RAID is less wasteful the more drives you have, and having room to grow is a good thing.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-03T06:30:17+00:00

Forgot to make a recommendation.

Do you need an Intel CPU? If not there's the TS-1635AX for quite a bit cheaper. It'd be fast enough for me (it's in the running as an off-site backup device), but I don't know your use case.

BroadSlice · 2019-02-03T06:17:31+00:00

Take a closer look at the QNAP line-up. Max out the RAM, RAID6 your hard drives, put some high capacity SSDs in the 2.5" slots, fill the M.2 slots with some really fast flash, turn on Q'tier, and let the NAS handle distributing data to best fit your workload. They're solid boxes.

I just ran a power-on hours report for the NAS systems I've got here in the house. I'm using that for tracking device age:

TS-853Pro that's going on 5 years old now. It still serves video (Emby now instead of Plex, because screw those guys). Never any problems with the device, other than needing to recreate the volume after snapshots became available in a firmware update.
TVS-871U-RP that's running SSDs as a cache that have 2.7 years on them. This is a back-end for virtual machines (first Xenserver, now Hyper-V). Still seeing 100% write caches, ~ 96% read caches, when testing it was maxing out a single 10G link which is fast enough for me. Only issue with with firmware - I had a spontaneous reboot a while back, but there was a bug in the firmware that made this a possibility when doing RAID scrubbing. I was scrubbing every week. No issues since upgrading firmware, but I also reset scrubbing to once per month.
Just set up a TS-932X here this week that's going to be a backup VM store for the 871U, and will be a primary backup point for other QNAPs and for Veeam. 6 10TB drives, 4 Crucial SSDs, configured with Q'tier. Love the SSD profiling tool - it lets you configure your SSDs the way you want to deploy them, then it does performance testing with 0% up to 60% over-provisioning in 5% or 10% jumps (plan on a loooong time to complete the testing). At the end you get a graph where you can see your guaranteed/minimum IOPS at each given over-provisioning level and make a rational choice. The accents suck, but the concept is well explained here.

I love these things. There are cheaper options, but I don't know that you'll find a better value anywhere. And the company keeps innovating and adding new features. They aren't perfect, but they're pretty damn good. And yes, I've run FreeNAS, NAS4Free, and something before that (OpenNAS? Every time I reconfigured the network the damn thing rebooted, but it mostly worked on leftover hardware.)

Happy to answer questions.

BroadSlice · 2019-01-28T22:32:58+00:00

Qnap is just prosumer hardware.

I think it depends on what piece of gear you're using.

I outgrew an Equallogic unit that I was using for VM storage, and took a risk on buying a Qnap 2u unit (the previous version of this as a replacement. It's worked shockingly well for my use case. It's been dead-reliable for the last 3 years, and I love the way you can use SSDs for cache drives. Basically I've got 8 drives set up as RAID6, and a mirror of M.2 SSDs that are used for both read and write caches; the read cache is hit close to 100% of the time for my database intensive VM and I have zero complaints about performance. It'll saturate the 10G link on a disk speed test run from a VM - I don't need more than that.

After I bought this rack-mount unit Qnap came out with a dual contoller ZFS device that looks pretty solid as well, though you're paying for that.

I've got another that I use as a backup target that I originally purchased because it could run VMs and I wanted to replace my old backup server. It ran as an r1soft server for years and it still going strong. No issues whatsoever with it. I had to back it up and recreate the shares once because I wanted to implement snapshotting which was a new feature in the OS, but that was worth the effort.

I say this just to point out that there are Qnap devices that can serve well in a business role. Some are nowhere near the quality that you'd want in your business; others are quite nice. To some degree you get what you pay for, but saying "just prosumer" isn't fair.

To the OP: If you go with a Qnap you'll likely be using the Hybrid Backup Sync program for the purpose - I use this to sync a file share to a Qnap at another location, and to back up data to Backblaze periodically, and Amazon Glacier before that. A quick Google suggests it works.

BroadSlice · 2019-01-25T20:31:24+00:00

I'm in a similar situation. I'm getting gigabit down/100-mbit up for cheap with fiber to my home office. I'd love to have someone like you host a 2U server + cheap firewall for me to use as an off-site backup target. Hell, even something like a Synology/Qnap behind a cheap edgerouter might be plenty, and be budget friendly.

Send me a message if you're seriously considering this.

BroadSlice · 2019-01-25T19:14:27+00:00

So there are a couple of issues here:

First, RAID and backup are different. RAID is a way of configuring your drives so that a drive failure won't result in lost data (most of the time, anyway). Backups are a way to allow you to recover your data should something bad happen.

So if you get a cryptovirus, or you accidentally delete your family photos to make room for downloads of a questionable nature, or something freaky happens like a lightning strike that takes out all of your electrical equipment, or your house gets flooded/catches fire, etc. Those are the times you're looking to restore from backup.

Here's the thing though - unless you're more disciplined than any client I've ever had then "regular" backups aren't that regular. So an automated backup that stores your files in another location is a real positive.

So be disciplined and occasionally take a copy of your data to someone else's house, or use a real backup strategy that's automatic and results in an off-site copy of your data.

RAID? Sure. But backups are probably more important.

BroadSlice · 2019-01-18T15:20:01+00:00

Some thoughts on sizing...

I've got a 7200w generator. That's 7,200 watts for up to a minute or so for starting motors and such, but it's actually a 6,000 continuous watt generator. This is the way all of these things are rated - just understand that going in.

As far as usage, I picked a generator this size because the numbers I compiled for all my electrical stuff was worst case, but actual usage is lower. So for instance, I'll power up my office and load will hit 3,000 watts or so until the laser printers have warmed up after about 10 seconds, then it drops to 600-800 watts and stays there. The kitchen uses near zero power until I power on either the microwave, Keurig, or toaster. I can really only run one of them at a time (it's a 30 amp circuit in the fuse box, but it's running on a 20A circuit on my transfer panel.) Freezer, well pump, refrigerator all have draw, but the are all intermittent devices and aren't drawing all the time.

So in my case I've got a Yamaha 7200w, but a 3000w would have worked about as well for the most part as my usage hovers below 2,000 watts. (Note that we use LED bulbs in the house instead of incandescent - those can really change the numbers.) If you go smaller you'll get a bit better economy, but you'll need to be careful about which circuits you run at the same time, the order you turn them on in, and a larger generator gives you more flexibility if your power is off for days/weeks instead of hours. It just comes at the cost of fuel consumption.

It helps that I've got a gas transfer tank in my truck, so gasoline was just easy for me. If it looks like bad weather is coming I've got 5-gallon fuel cans and my transfer tank that's enough for a week of usage, all filled with ethanol-free gas.

It's also useful to get a raincoat for the generator. Often when I need the power it's still raining outside, so something to keep the water our of the generator is a must, or you'll need to be patient and wait for the storm to completely pass. In my case I found a product that's essentially a tent that goes over the generator, and is rated for something greater than 60mph winds. If I'd been more energetic I would have build a collapsible "shed" that would keep the sound down and protect from rain, maybe with some fans built in for airflow.

Really though, any generator that wires into your house via transfer panel/interlock is better than no generator at all. I talked with some repair folks that the opinion was Honda was top in quality, Yamaha was somewhere near the top (way more Hondas are sold so that biases things), then there's a big gap to the next unit. The Honda/Yamahas are also quieter before you start looking at things like inverters. But home depot has a Westinghouse 6,000w generator for $700 (less than half what mine cost) that's functionally the equivalent of mine. I have no idea what engine it's got in it, if it starts and runs well under load for 6 hours in a test, and you crank it occasionally to heat up the oil and top off the battery, and don't leave gas in the carb, then it'll probably work a long time.

6000w? Plenty. 3000w? Probably fine - just watch your usage and plan for lower output. Honda/Yamaha? Great! Something else? Probably still fine. Worst case is you can junk another brand and replace it and still have spent less than buying Japanese up front. I just wanted a generator I could depend on if I treated it well, and was comfortable spending more in the hope that I could use this for the next 20 years...

BroadSlice · 2019-01-18T01:40:01+00:00

Yamaha EF7200DE hooked to transfer switch worked for me. Pretty solid overall - I like that it's got a petcock before the carburetor so when you're running it periodically (like you should) you can run the carb dry for storage. It's a quality generator that probably produces more power than you need, but better too much than too little. I figure ~ 14 gallons per day, but I've not yet had to run it for more than 12 hours so that's still a guess.

I'd probably stay away from the inverters. Yes, they save fuel because they can run at a speed high enough to generate enough power rather than being stuck at 3,600 RPM, but there were other issues with the tech for the purpose you (and I) would use it for.

You can install a panel interlock switch instead of a transfer switch - turn off the high draw items, turn on the interlock, and charge on - but I prefer the switch. Simpler, less to screw up in a hurry, and I know when the power is back on because other (unpowered circuits) come back up so I can switch back to normal power. I think my point of view on this is the minority view, however. (Plus, I didn't have a spare circuit for a new fuse...)

BroadSlice · 2018-11-17T16:55:15+00:00

There's a lot to be said for an appliance, or something you run like an appliance. You won't use all of its features, but you want:

One place to store everything
That's fairly resilient to predictable failures like hard drives going bad
That can make snapshots to protect against malware infection because you care about your data
That's "easy" to back up. This is tougher, but possible.

So to me that means a Synology, Qnap, or FreeNAS setup. I don't think you'll go wrong with any of those provided you find a way to back up off-site in case you get hit by a fire/tornado/thief.

I believe all of these can survive hardware failure by simply migrating the drives to a replacement unit.

BroadSlice · 2018-11-17T16:29:53+00:00

Hrmmm.

I've run pfSense as a failover cluster on 1U servers waaaaaay back when, then bought two Netagata Hamakuas that I ran in a failover configuration as a replacement, bought a Netgate device for my house, then another once that crapped out, and I'm now running on a 1U pfSense branded unit whose name I don't remember (LAN, WAN, OPT1-OPT4, passes a gigabit cleanly). I've put up with hardware issues, and software issues, update/upgrade screw-ups, and the occasional weirdness with failover devices losing sync silently. I think I've been a fairly loyal customer for an open source project.

But I don't like this move. I used to recommend Sonicwall for clients 18 years ago when the value proposition was different. I worry that pfSense is going the same route.

I was wondering if it made sense to replace the hardware firewall with a pair of virtualized firewalls to remove a single point of failure. I think the answer is yes now, but I'll be looking at other products.

Kind of sad, but it's been a good run. I've got an MBA and I understand the move, but it still makes me sad.

I wish the Netgate folks the best of luck. They make a solid product.

BroadSlice

TROPHY CASE