Menuorder PFSense 2.0

Supermule

This applies to 1.2.3 as well, but thats not important.

How come Backup/restore, factory defaults, halt system and reboot are under diagnostics instead of system??? Nothing diagnostic about it. Only concerns general system….

jimp

All of those except for Backup/Restore are really only used for diagnostic purposes… In normal operation you don't need to shutdown, reboot, or default the config.

Not sure why Backup/Restore is there, perhaps because it's always been there and people would miss it if it were moved. Though restoring from a backup isn't something you should have to do often, making backups is.

There are some other items that are somewhat debatable between Status and Diagnostics as well, though if everything was under one menu it would be far too long. :-)

dszp

I'm OK with everything where it's at now, and would definitely have some adjusting if it were changed, but I would like to see a quick backup widget on the dashboard or something, to download a backup easily, right on the main page. Obviously the really automated backup system is the one you get with commercial support, so I understand making it too easy on the free version would be discouraged :-) 'cause really I'd like to see a 'backup with SSH' option that auto-backed up to the SSH server you specified, but that is functionally the same (mostly) as the commercial option as I understand it, only you supply your own SSH server.

jimp

Re: the backup over ssh, there is a bit too much involved there to automate and wrap that in a GUI neatly anyhow. There are instructions on the wiki already, but personally I wouldn't want to encourage people to make ssh keys without a passphrase any more than we already do by having those instructions there at all…

We'll let you shoot yourself in the foot but we won't hand you the gun. :-)

A backup button widget on the dashboard isn't a half bad idea though. Widgets are pretty simple, someone could probably code that up in less than an hour. Probably more like 10-15 minutes.

dszp

Well, it doesn't have to be SSH…I haven't used the commercial support (I wish!) so I'm not sure how that plugin does the backups but something similar for third party/self-hosted servers would be nice. But I know that's one of the benefits of commercial support. Technically you could limit ssh permissions so the user could only write and not read, so it could be secure without a password...anyway :-)

I'd write the widget if I knew what I was doing, but it would probably take me a few hours to figure it out, as I'm not really familiar with the pfSense codebase or interface, though I have a lot of Perl and some PHP (picked up easily enough due to Perl) experience in the past (not recently though).