General Questions

Ok this may be long.
Ive been using mono and pfsense and freenas for the past several years and love the projects, and progress. Every system has its own benefits. As i see it Mono is ment to be an embedded platform system, or is more geared for that direction to make it as small as possible. (feel free to correct me anywhere i am wrong here.) This is where i am courious. It seems the PF team is sticking to a more robust system with different packages and what not i love that and it has its uses, plus it is a freebsd 6.x system designed to be run on more robust hardware, etc.

My ideas/thoughts/questions.

I remember a while back there was a reward for an uipgrade of mono to the 6.x current version of free bsd.
Any status on that?
Also with that upgrade will there be an implementation of CARP failover into M0n0?

What i like and dont like about pf.
I find myself using right now hardware from logic supply which makes a few nice mini itx systems, however id much rather use soekriss boxen ive used there net 4801 series and move it and with the release of the net 5501 this will alow me to run pf on them with the faster hardware and what have you. however the embedded version of pf disables vga on boot which on the soekriss boards is fine, however whern trying to flash to an generic pc such as a nini itx system or just a cf/usb disk on pc hardware you have to use a serial connection to config the setup... this is a hassle because serial is becoming harder and harder to come by. I like the fact that mono has sever embedded versions of their product and would love to stick to mono because of this. Ive mentioned this to the pf team and they seem to not want to support too many embedded versions of their product.. which is fine.

My situation is im a it consultant and am attempting to phase out several small netgear and linksys routers at some of our small business clients with an embedded mono solution, however id love to have carp fail over and the other niceties of pf, but have them on embedded or mini itx hardware. I really like the soekris stuff i believe that it is more solid hardware or industrial quality hardware, however their website sucks and their ordering process is horrible. Someone needs to recommended them oscommerce or some sort of shopping engine.

Im terribly sorry for the poor wording of this post its kinda a hodge podge of my thoughts not very well put together.
basicly i guess im asking what is the precieved future of mono with the pf competition. Also i believe that these two projects will win out over smoothwall/ipcom/freesco/and coyote, though i loved discovering and using all of those throught the years.

I remember a while back there was a reward for an uipgrade of mono to the 6.x current version of free bsd.
Any status on that?

Nobody took up the offer, so Manuel came out with a 6.x version himself, available on the website as the 1.3 beta releases.

Also with that upgrade will there be an implementation of CARP failover into M0n0?

That would require switching to pf, and m0n0wall 1.3 still uses ipfilter, so no.

But, Manuel is currently in the process of completely rewriting m0n0wall. At that point, I think the project will be reinvigorated. It's been really stagnant the past couple years or so, while pfsense has progressed rapidly over the same time frame. I'm not sure if m0n0 will ever switch off of ipfilter though, and ipfilter has no capabilities to statefully fail over.

basicly i guess im asking what is the precieved future of mono with the pf competition.

It's not really "competition". They're largely two completely different systems with different focus.

The future of m0n0wall is hard for me to envision without seeing the final release and capabilities of Manuel's rewrite. I have a feeling it will bring a lot of renewed development efforts into the m0n0wall community.

I also wouldn't rule out two versions of the pfsense embedded image, VGA and serial. Though don't hold your breath on that either.

If you want to standardize on a platform, I wouldn't decide just yet. Once the next generation of m0n0wall is out, the long term direction of this project will be much more clear.