Where is the documentation?
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Yes, the documentation is lacking. Point taken. But there is a lot of documentation for 2.1x that is still valid. I maintain, that for someone with firewall experience, the install and basic configuration are not overly complex. I also think that when you require advanced features, you need to invest some time in research and testing, and maybe some money to buy a good reference book. pfSense is primarily a firewall, and UTM features are outside of 90+% of common installs, so docs and forum help on those topics are going to be particularly sparse. Perhaps something like Untangle (is it still called that?) would be a better fit. Designed for UTM, and Linux based to boot.
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I look at it this way. If I can make all that stuff work on pfsense (and I have), anyone can.
I just used the online documentation, and some youtube video and a little experimentation.
I've never seen the book. I'm sure it would have made things easier though.
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You can expect the documentation to get even better as time goes on, as we get bigger and bring on more personnel and have more time to focus on documentation once we're not all constantly overloaded providing support. It's an ongoing never-ending process. It's good enough for most, but there will always be gaps. Especially in troubleshooting since it's very unpredictable.
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Yeah… You've got a great community here. On top of having little in the way of documentation for the current version of the product, plenty of people to tell a potential user that they don't know what they're talking about, don't have a clue, and then start calling them names. Kudos to not just the members, but the admins that allow (and dare I say even encourage?) this sort of behavior.
There is a saying… "If you run into a jerk in the morning, well he was just a jerk. If you run into jerks all day long, you're the jerk."
You came storming into the forum with nothing but complaints. The people here help others free of charge on their own time, and you managed to pretty much alienate all of us with your attitude. The admins here have been nothing but nice to you, but others are responsible for their own comments. You don't take any responsibility for your end in this unfortunate exchange. You have a chip on your shoulder and I don't see how that helps you get ahead.
Considering how all the docs are poor, the product itself is inscrutable and the forum members are hostile snobs, I wouldn't expect to see you still around.
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Yep. All my fault. Got it.
Guess the posts that I put before this one and all of the direct forum searches and searches via Google don't really matter.
Hey, Admins…kill my account. I won't bother returning.
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yes oddly enough your first post 5 days ago (https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=83065.msg454681#msg454681), only got 5 replies with suggestions.
then you decided not to continue that thread.then you started this thread to blame the entire community, for having crappy documentation.
then you are surprised that you are being called a troll.
sorry for
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There is something I would wish for:
I wish there was a automatic server that builds a PDF of the https://doc.pfsense.org site.
This way you can have a more or less up to date offline documentation of pfSense available to download whenever you want.
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Interesting suggestion. I bet there's a 'wiki downloader' of something similar that would do it, probably better. It might even be syncable.
Steve
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Would this do ? http://www.httrack.com/
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Would this do ? http://www.httrack.com/
No. This just downloads a website which wget can do.
Something fully automated by a server that makes a organized PDF document on the fly.
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It's the sort of thing I would expect to exist but a quick google doesn't show much that's promising. The search gets bogged down by code to download the whole of wikipedia though. ::)
Steve
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It's the sort of thing I would expect to exist but a quick google doesn't show much that's promising. The search gets bogged down by code to download the whole of wikipedia though. ::)
Steve
Sadly, I think it would have to be created inhouse by pfSense. And its not that easy to implement.
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There are mediawiki plugins to generate such a document on the server side, though I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to implement or not. People might mistake that for the actual book. Not to mention it would take quite a bit of space/cpu time to generate.
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I've played quite a lot with mediawiki to pdf exporters.
My conclusion is that none are satisfying. You always get a lot of mis-formatted stuff. -
Better than nothing when you just hosed your pfSense install and have no internet connection?
Steve
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Then you could have an offline copy of pfsense and even the forum using httrack ?
