Release 1.2.1
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1.2 is stable, 1.2.1 is beta, but you already knew that.
Although the 0.0.1 version change suggests otherwise, 1.2.1 has big changes under the hood. Big changes..possibly a lot of new problems/bugs..some not yet known.
Also: betas are not supported, you could run into problems in the future with for example updating. -
It is fairly stable. Really how you will know if its good enough for your needs is to run it in your own test environment. I have pfSense 1.2.1 running in 4 locations which are all working fine for our needs. From what I've read there is known issues with IPSec and with vlans. If you make use of those then you may want to wait a bit longer. In my case I use openvpn instead of IPSec.
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It's hard to test without actually using it in production..
Is there a roadmap/date for the " stable" release?
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When it's done.
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When it's done.
I love thousands of things about open source software and I truly appreciate the people who donate their time and talents.
HOWEVER - this answer is the one aspect of open source that BUGS THE SHIT OUT OF ME. Why is it so hard for smart dedicated people who make great products like PFSense to provide a road map? For example - "We are shooting for final release in a month. We have four known bugs that we are fixing and then we plan to release unless anything new pops up. Check back in month and we'll either be done or we'll have another update posted letting you know where we stand". Is that so hard?
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HOWEVER - this answer is the one aspect of open source that BUGS THE SHIT OUT OF ME. Why is it so hard for smart dedicated people who make great products like PFSense to provide a road map?
Because the people that make opensource do that in their free time.
Have you ever commited anything to an open project?
If you do you'll notice that you never have the time you need/would like to have ;)A good place to read about the progress is http://blog.pfSense.com
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http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/When_Will_A_Release_Occur
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If you want to support a Release Engineer(re@) for pfSense it would be really nice otherwise please accpet the reality.
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http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/When_Will_A_Release_Occur
That link says "A development timeline will be made available in the coming months to provide some guidance as to our release plans along with some rough estimates on dates."
Retrieved from "http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/When_Will_A_Release_Occur"
That's all I was suggesting was necessary. However there is way too much emphasis on squashing anyone who asks "the forbidden question" - i.e. "any idea when the next release will happen?" Instead of providing a minimal amount of guidance.
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Its not a problem of forbidden question.
If you want to be safe by support if you want to accept open source and its "when its done?" please do so.Its no good to read that 'frequent' question of give me this than hearing 'thank you'!
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PFSense is a open-source security product and rightfully so to be a little slow with new updates to the software. New code or updates have to be tested both in labs and out in the field over time to make sure it works before adding or making additional changes. I am running the latest snapshot of 1.2.1 RC1 and it looks solid. Although some more testing is needed to make sure it does work with most platforms.
Considering it is an open source product and if you have the time you can add improvements yourself so we can all benefit.
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We ran into far more problems switching to FreeBSD 7.0 than we had anticipated, some of which are very difficult kernel issues.
In hindsight, 1.2.1 should have stayed on FreeBSD 6.x but we're too far along now to switch back. Lesson learned for the future.
There aren't significant changes in the pfSense code from 1.2 to 1.2.1, the underlying FreeBSD version change is significant though. We can't estimate a release at this time because we have no idea what it's going to require to fix particularly one of the outstanding issues.
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CMB - thanks for a fair answer. For what it's worth I think the move to FreeBSD 7.0 is a positive thing and hopefully will help 1.3 in the long run as well.
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While there has been pain using FreeBSD 7.0 I think I'm not the only one who has appreciated that decision because of the increased support for "new" hardware in FreeBSD 7.0 compared with FreeBSD 6.3
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I am also very glad, that the move to FreeBSD 7 has been made now as there are some drivers that were not incorporated in 6. Regarding the deadlines I have to remind all of you that many commercial companies (such as a famous big operating system producer) very often have to reschedule their releases (sometimes by years!). So, this is not really a disadvantage of opensource projects.
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The main issue is that I'm getting my two Dell R200 machines to swap a older p4 machine.
I have no choice but to switch to the 1.2.1 beta otherwise it doesn't find the SAS 6i/R Internal Controller RAID PCIe for the SAS raid 1 setup :(
I'm hoping that the 1.2.1 will run stable in our production envoirement.. with the current pfflowd+squid package..
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Considering that PSense 1.3 is a long way out I really appreciate that PFSense 1.2.1 will be running FreeBSD7.
