thank you all

@Gertjan said in 24.11-RELEASE Shows update available, but the update appears to be a beta release:

edit : also : afaik : Here, very soon now, a 25.03 Beta release bulletin will be posted.

There it is : https://www.netgate.com/blog/tag/pfsense

and it's shows up on the dashboard :

9b54c578-ac85-4c71-9951-dbc77ef09d57-image.png

@stephenw10 I decided since I was going to do a completely clean install that I'd follow the instructions to install an nmve ssd. Much success - everything works including reboot.

But there was a mystery - tehere's a step to erase the metdata on your emmc drive. But when I got in to the recovery mode there were no drives at all.

I suspect I had a bum emmc drive and it finally gave up when I went to do the reinstall. Good/lucky timing I guess.

If you never logged from 192.168.1.100 then that looks bad!

Yeah the MAC address being the same is odd...

Yup there we go. Tailscale acts more like a proxy in firewall terms. You can only see the traffic to/from it and not the source/destination inside the tailscale network.

Thanks All,

The other confusing part for me was that I couldn't ping the Windows machines as you have explained. However, I could ping the Debian12 machines. Boy is there a lot to learn.
Thanks again.

So if any one 'flow' exceeds 2Gbps then all other traffic will be dropped?

You can apply limiters with masks set retrict any particular flow to 2Gbps, or just below that.
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/trafficshaper/limiters.html#creating-limiters

Some services are pre-defined in the shaper wizard but it's by no means definitive.

@stephenw10 @nimrod

Thanks for the advice guys. I have been so busy but managed to get free to look into this. I nuked my pFsense and this time I set a keep alive 25 seconds on the peer, now I get handshakes.

I followed every step in the Mullvad guide, looks like I've got a Mullvad IP assigned and no DNS leaks so I guess it worked.

Only issue I noticed is that if I reboot my Protectli, there is still a handshake between the peer and tunnel but I can't get internet access. I had to nuke my install again and follow the guide again for Mullvad wireguard to work.

@sysadminfromhell said in pfSense vs TNSR:

if I have to move to another Firewall Vendor :(

Why move?
I doubt you will get much better performance from other firewalls on the same HW. Assuming you want to have some level of functionality that is similar to what pfsense offers.
I have been playing around with Sophos XG, which is available for free for home use. It has some minor limitations in # of CPU's and memory, but I get pretty much the same performance out of that as I do with pfsense in a like for like comparison (same amount of CPU's). Memory has never been an issue for me...

@bobleny said in Is there an RSS Feed with Patch/Release notes ?:

Are they announced anywhere else

Here Netgate blogs and pick one.
Or a RSS reader on your phone - never tried that myself ?
Or, somewhat related : [this](Auto update check, checks for updates to base system + packages and sends email alerts) - and this I'm using for years now, works perfect.

@stephenw10 Tremendous!! Upgrade completed successfully.. Much appreciated.

@vr3alist said in two routers configuration:

what guarantees me the ISP won't change the settings in few months ?

What setting would they change? My modem has been in bridge mode for many years.

Hmm, that has to be a security setting in Firefox.

Yes it could be but not in pfSense because pfSense cannot 'see' that device directly. It only sees a virtual NIC presented by VBox. So you need to check the NIC in Windows to see any errors present there.

Unless you have configured VBox to allow access to the USB NIC directly? That would be a far more complex setup though.

FWIW upgrading to 24.11 didn't change this behavior. Private window still works. It remains a mystery.

@Gblenn
HI

Problem solved.

The NUC has 2 Ethernet Ports as well as a Wireless Connection Capability.

I did not connect the wireless but it still came up as Connection port 1, so my attempts to configure were using a Wireless link, which was not connected and the first Ethernet Port.

I finally ignored the Wireless link totally, set up the WAN and LAN ports on the pfsense box as Ethernet ports 1 and 2 and lo and behold it works.

Thanks for all the help.

Cheers

Colin

My thanks to all those who have started appreciating my posts and recognising their quality :)