<div dir="ltr"><div>Not sure if this is still helpful to the OP, but for what it's worth:</div><div><br></div><div>1) Firewalls: for hackability balanced with maintained stability, and still a reasonable amount of feisty OSS grit, I've come to be a fan of Mikrotik; you can centrally manage them (never seen in a device at this price point), they can do pretty much anything you can dream of on a Linux firewall, have a mature well understood interface and broad community of people who know how to get them done, have lots of hooks for running scripts, have L2TP/OpenVPN/IPSec nicely bundled, can work as routed or bridged, and great debugging tools integrated in. The "winbox" thing can be pretty easily ignored, and their bang-for-buck is crazy good. If you don't want to buy the hardware/want to run in a VM Container, they will license their hard work as a VM or image you can run on a PC for cheap, like $45 for a one time license. The Barracuda NGFW's we do (also linux boxes on bespoke hardware, and much more costly) can do some of the stuff a bit easier or more palitably to the corp client in someways, but it darn crazy how close a Mikrotik RB750 or RB4011 can come to eating their lunch (and sometimes does, at our shop!). YMMV.</div><div><br></div><div></div><div>2) As far as a server with services, I've been just doing raw CentOS and doing what I need, as needed. It's not good for giving to other people, per se, but every SMB/home server distro I've ever tried has died of non-maintenance, so I kinda gave up a while back. I'm kinda being suckered into unRaid right now though, as a replacement for how I run my home/containers/etc, because it ticks all the boxes I need... again, while closely aligned and build out of OSS stock, it's not as open as some would require, so it's not for everyone.<br></div><div><br></div><div>-C</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, 1 Dec 2020 at 15:43, John Sellens <<a href="mailto:jsellens@syonex.com">jsellens@syonex.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">I've had great success with pfsense for many years, and have no complaints.<br>
I've run HA pfsense pairs for years with no problems or downtime.<br>
<br>
I just upgraded a 10 year old physical pfsense box running a long<br>
obsolete 1.x version of pfsense to current 2.4 and the configuration file<br>
imported perfectly.<br>
<br>
I've also bought Netgate hardware running pfsense and found it to be<br>
reliable and cost effective. I had one with a hardware problem, and<br>
the support from Netgate getting it replaced was fantastic.<br>
<br>
Hope that helps - cheers<br>
<br>
John<br>
<br>
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