Navigating to Buy pfSense +
-
@w0w said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
As others have said, it would be great to implement a license for beta testers. I think the minimum number of licenses for testing should be 4, for correct testing on both real and virtual hardware. I think there are few people willing to pay for 4 annual licenses at once for the price over 100 or... you can forget about the effectiveness of the beta program for plus version.
I think the issue right now is that they don't have a way to distinguish a new NDI from an old one. Otherwise how can it be that some OEM can use one activation to activate one Home and Lab license, then image the entire disk to hundreds of devices and all these devices get to obtain a client certificate to access the update repo.
We have no portal for customers to see licences / NDI, expiry dates and revoke stuff.
The crux of the issue seems to be that at the back-end it isn't ready to handle this sort of stuff. Once they fix that they should be able to let us transfer a license to a new NDI and manage licenses.
-
@Darkk said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Actually it looks like my instance just got updated showing the new effective start and end dates. If you add the Netgate Service and Support widget on your dashboard it will show you the current support info.
It would make sense that I never received the new token as my instance is already registered with Netgate.
Mine only shows me this (pfSense+ installed on bare metal earlier this month):
It looks correct on the Netgate webpage:
It shows as registered too:
At this point I am not sure what any of it will mean over the coming days or weeks. Nothing actually shows an expiry date either.
️ -
@w0w said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
or... you can forget about the effectiveness of the beta program for plus version.
I have been active testing pfSense + on white box and NetGate devices from alpha through beta then RC to release over the last few years. I am hard pressed to rationalize paying for the ability to continue this testing activity. As it now stands, I will place the 4100 MAX in production service and move the white box devices into deep storage and if things don't change, they will be sent off to be recycled. I will not run anything other than release on the 4100 MAX.
Sometimes things just suck!
Ted Quade
-
@mfld said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Otherwise how can it be that some OEM can use one activation to activate one Home and Lab license, then image the entire disk to hundreds of devices and all these devices get to obtain a client certificate to access the update repo.
As far as I can tell the NDI is generated from the NIC MAC addresses. It's certainly possible that some shady vendor changed the NDI generation code to reuse the exact same NDI on different boxes with different MAC addresses, but this is only speculation. Ideally the firewall instance should use an authenticated token with Netgate online ID instead of the two step registration token / NDI, but getting crypto/license management right when the code is readily available for inspection is not as simple as it may first seen.
-
@RobbieTT Double check your Netgate hardware ID against the order. If it matches and still showing community support then I would put in a support ticket so they can look into it. Also on the widget there is a refresh button so give that a try.
-
Bought a one-year subscription and will re-evaluate next year. Thanks to @Darkk for the discount code tip.
+1 to @Amodin's mention of Quicken's program to compensate beta testers. That may be a good path for Netgate, along with some scheme to address folks with multiple lab machines.
[Quicken] made the beta test program open to all (current users) and every year they waive an annual subscription cost based on a beta tester's participation.
My $0.02 and I don't work for Netgate nor am I an apologist for them. There's surely a group of folks on Home+Lab who provide value to Netgear as beta testers: detailed and actionable bug reports, collaborating with Netgear on debugging, etc. But it's probably well under half of the current Home+Lab userbase. Everyone else on the (formerly) free Home+Lab version is riding on the paid coattails of Netgate HW customers and TAC subscribers. Netgate has a business to run and developers to pay.
-
@marcg said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Bought a one-year subscription and will re-evaluate next year. Thanks to @Darkk for the discount code tip.
+1 to the mention from @Amodin regarding Quicken's program to compensate beta testers. That may be a good path for Netgate, along with some scheme to address folks with multiple lab machines.
[Quicken] made the beta test program open to all (current users) and every year they waive an annual subscription cost based on a beta tester's participation.
My $0.02 and I don't work for Netgate nor am I an apologist for them. There's surely a group of folks on Home+Lab who provide value to Netgear as beta testers: detailed and actionable bug reports, collaborating with Netgear on debugging, etc. But it's probably well under half of the current Home+Lab userbase. Everyone else on the (formerly) free Home+Lab version is riding on the paid coattails of Netgate HW customers and TAC subscribers. Netgate has a business to run.
Now as home+Lab users are paying for TAC-Lite, Netgate will have to formalize its beta program and find a way to continue getting this feedback.
-
@chudak said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Now as home+Lab users are paying for TAC-Lite, Netgate will have to formalize its beta program and find a way to continue getting this feedback.
I think for beta testing it should come with a beta testing license good for short period of time like 30 days which should be automatic by the software. After 30 days you'll need to update to the newest beta or revert back to CE or Plus if you have a current paid subscription. If there aren't any beta version to test then it shouldn't be an issue as everyone would be on CE or Plus.
With beta testing it shouldn't matter what Netgate Hardware ID would be as it's tied to the clock of the software. It would have to be verifiable by Netgate servers to prevent cheating.
It would be a good way to test various network cards without worrying about the hardware ID changing.
-
@Darkk said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
@RobbieTT Double check your Netgate hardware ID against the order. If it matches and still showing community support then I would put in a support ticket so they can look into it. Also on the widget there is a refresh button so give that a try.
There is no Netgate ID against my order on the invoice, just the order number and the SKU. I have raised a ticket on your suggestion.
️ -
@RobbieTT said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
@Darkk said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
@RobbieTT Double check your Netgate hardware ID against the order. If it matches and still showing community support then I would put in a support ticket so they can look into it. Also on the widget there is a refresh button so give that a try.
There is no Netgate ID against my order on the invoice, just the order number and the SKU. I have raised a ticket on your suggestion.
️3 h after, my order it's still not fulfilled and I see no update on the support widget
How do I raise a ticket?
TIA
-
@Darkk said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
@chudak said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Now as home+Lab users are paying for TAC-Lite, Netgate will have to formalize its beta program and find a way to continue getting this feedback.
I think for beta testing it should come with a beta testing license good for short period of time like 30 days which should be automatic by the software. After 30 days you'll need to update to the newest beta or revert back to CE or Plus if you have a current paid subscription. If there aren't any beta version to test then it shouldn't be an issue as everyone would be on CE or Plus.
With beta testing it shouldn't matter what Netgate Hardware ID would be as it's tied to the clock of the software. It would have to be verifiable by Netgate servers to prevent cheating.
It would be a good way to test various network cards without worrying about the hardware ID changing.
How do you in this scenario encourage/sign up more beta testers? Where is the incentive?
-
@chudak said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
How do I raise a ticket?
TIA
https://portal.netgate.com
️ -
@RobbieTT said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
https://portal.netgate.com
Thx
But I can't login or reset the password :(
But I see my subscription as active now!
-
@chudak said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
Now as home+Lab users are paying for TAC-Lite, Netgate will have to formalize its beta program and find a way to continue getting this feedback.
I think those who participate in dev/beta testing and willing to pay for it will be vanishingly small.
I am an active participant in testing and own a Netgate 6100 with pfSense+ included. However, I do most of my testing on my own Supermicro 1U box. Occasionally Netgate asks me to run dev or experimental loads on my 6100, so I have to do some swapping around of which device is in a production state and which is being used for the testing.
On current plans I would require an additional paid pfSense+ subscription even though I can only actually use 1 device at a time. Put another way I would require 2 active licences even though I only have 1 WAN connection and be charged annually for this privilege. All on top the time and effort of the dev/beta work, in order to help develop the product.
Clearly this a bad deal and unless things change my contributions will cease when my current additional pfSense+ licence expires. I am far from a free-loader and I have paid for a Netgate 6100 and I am prepared to contribute too. It is the idea of having to pay again that I cannot accept.
Of course, with less beta testers I am aware that my Netgate 6100, pfSense and pfSense+ will develop more slowly or with more bugs and issues. The loss of dev/beta contributors will impact everyone, not just the test community.
️ -
And IMHO Netgate have made a "Redhat RHEL --> Fedora" on the "Home Plus" users ....
I don't think you understand the relation Fedora is to RHEL. Fedora is - and has always been - the upstream development branch for RHEL. You want a new feature in RHEL? Needs to be upstreamed to Fedora first.
In no way is it comparable to Netgate making Plus exclusively a paid for project. Indeed, the pfSense project is the total reverse of Red Hat's approach to development. If they followed a Red Hat approach, then CE would be upstream for Plus (paid product ala RHEL). The reality is that Plus is the upstream for CE. CE should be less stable and quicker developed, whilst Plus should have a longer development period. -
@ahxcjay said in Navigating to Buy pfSense +:
And IMHO Netgate have made a "Redhat RHEL --> Fedora" on the "Home Plus" users ....
I don't think you understand the relation Fedora is to RHEL. Fedora is - and has always been - the upstream development branch for RHEL. You want a new feature in RHEL? Needs to be upstreamed to Fedora first.
In no way is it comparable to Netgate making Plus exclusively a paid for project. Indeed, the pfSense project is the total reverse of Red Hat's approach to development. If they followed a Red Hat approach, then CE would be upstream for Plus (paid product ala RHEL). The reality is that Plus is the upstream for CE. CE should be less stable and quicker developed, whilst Plus should have a longer development period.And the same is on the ceph project. If you need a new feature it gets implemented in the upstream first and then goes to the downstream RH/IBM paid branches.
IMHO Ntegate is making a big mistake that they don't follow this model and sooner or later will have to pay for it.
-
I think the "new" arrangement is a disaster. Netgate does its own thing, it doesn't care about the community, in my opinion, it probably sees us as an inconvenient sitting tenant, after-all, they don't own pfSense, it is open-source software. Previously posted, and I, pointed out that almost everywhere else you update the community edition with the latest, and once the bugs are fixed you port that into the production product. In fact, that is, how can I say this, how all businesses work, they have DEV, SIT, UAT and PROD environments, and through a series of refinements all the bugs are squashed and tested by the community, or in a company developers and test teams, then released to production. This peculiar updating production and porting it back to DEV is bizarre, and perhaps indicates some lack of experience in industry standards, and frankly common sense. I wouldn't part with a bean because I feel genuinely aggrieved and never give companies my hard-earned cash when badly treated. I run this stuff on my own hardware so I have control over processor, memory, speed, disk space, on a mini-PC, with dual 2.5Gb ports, and I have a duplicate unit as a spare. If I purchased a Netgate appliance what happens if it goes wrong? I can't fix it, I'd need a spare, and how would licensing work? It seems my bad experience with licensing isn't unique. We need to be able to move licenses around or reset them IF we change our hardware - for home users this could happen quite often. It just seems like Netgate management have little clue about who tests their software, who contributes, how this all works. And any problem with issuing large numbers of licenses to third-parties is exactly whose fault? That would bet Netgate, they are responsible for this whole issue, nobody else, it's them, Netgate.
Now I have to rebuild my unit back to CE, or find some other product. I won't evangelise the pfSense platform in future as I've no idea if it even has a future, I really don't see Netgate doing well out of this, if anything corporate purchasers may well see this as a time to re-evaluate whether Netgate is the right company to be dealing with. This really isn't a good solution, Netgate encouraged us to take out these home lab licenses, now we're the ones having to do all the work to sort out their mess.
It's always disappointing when a company makes a wrong decision, then doubles-down. Dig a hole, jump in, dig some more. Yeah.
-
Just a few random thoughts here. Been using PFS a long time... close to 8 years if memory serves. When I read about the PFS+ for 'free' I went and read the EULA. Not liking what I read, I backed away, not seeing anything worth the switch in my home-user use case, and wondering how easy/difficult it would be to back out when Netgate starts to charge for it, if it wasn't worth the cost over CE at that future point. Remember, we didn't know, when they started the 'free' home/lab PLUS version, just how it would evolve and what benefits it would offer over CE in the future.
I remember when that popular malware software company went from 'lifetime' to subscription. I bought 6 more of the 'lifetime' license version just before they switched, glad I did as they are all in use now. They have honored them through all the software updates/versions through the years and even when moved from my old PC to a new one. That's the right way run a business; honor what you promised and stand by what you put in writing. This I didn't see here. Ok so they made some changes after some squawking here and on other forums, but we shouldn't have to remind any company about what they put in writing that they said would do. If you promise '129.00 a year at some future point, for the home and lab version' then that's what should have been announced.
CE is free advertising for Netgate; I am sure that much of what they sell is to a user base that is familiar with PFSense because there is a CE version. And I am willing to bet that the reason why it works as well as it does is because the large user base of CE brings up suggestions here and bug reports - basically as unpaid product testers. Also many of the third party add-ons that are available to us wouldn't exist if there was no CE user base, and that would affect Netgate if those all go south if CE becomes a dinosaur.
Sorry for the longish post... just rambling here....
-
This is disappointing AF, being offered free upgrade to + then being told yeah, now of you want updates you need to pay annual subscription for support which you probably never use or disable your network while you reinstall back to CE and attempt to import your config with hope at least some of it (if any) will work. If I need to reinstall fine, I'll do it but I won't touch PFsense anymore even with a mopstick. At this point I have lost all confidence in the company and will go elsewhere. Theres plenty of solutions for home / lab where you can use fully featured product (without any support) for free. I am already in process of moving all vlans etc to Sophos XG Home and as far I'm happy with it. Good riddance Netgate
-
I have pfsense 23.05.1 plus and I am a home user. I plan on changing to the next CE version. I hope it will be offered as an upgrade to my current version so I can just upgrade to CE as It would make the change over very easy.
