I had been waiting for quite some time for 1.2RC4 to be kicked out of the way for 1.2 Final release. This release made some pretty big improvements from previous releases. Those improvements can be found here and here. What’s funny is I waited and waited like a little kid, then when it came out, I was probably the 300kth to download it. For some reason, I go so busy when this release hit it was crazy. However, when I did get around to installing it I did my home one first. I was running 1.2RC4 since the day it came out with zero issues. The upgrade went very smoothly. I wish all upgrades were that easy. Hint, when doing the firmware upgrade, click on another menu item to see a cool picture of a HD spitting out 1’s and 0’s. After I knew the install was a success I upgrade a number of other systems to the latest and greatest (6 in total) and had zero issues on the upgrade. After the upgrades were done, I reinstalled the packages that had newer release versions and kept on trucking.
This weekend I’ll be doing two more that are quite important and I will need to make sure I backup the configs before hand…..yeah, I didn’t on the other ones 🙂 I’m hoping the next year flies by for the BSD7 version of pfSense. It’s supposed to have a large number of improvements as well. FreeBSD’s website has a large number of them listed here. It amazes me that an already good product can go from release after release and the product just gets better and better.
I’m hoping my company will start using more of these instead of the Cisco ASA for our smaller clients, but we just started down the reseller path for Cisco so I don’t have to high of expectations for doing so. Oh well, I’ll use it where I can.
For more information on pfSense, it’s little brother m0n0wall or FreeBSD check out the hotlinks.