Where to get help?
Have you had trouble or don't know how to use a feature? Didn't understand what the official documentation says? Take it easy! We are a big and strong community, and someone in it will try to help you for sure!
Some facts
While selling OPNsense-based firewall solutions in comparison to commercial firewall closed-source solutions, customers commonly ask us a question such as, "Okay! It seems that this open source solution you are offering in your service can do anything that other closed source commercials listed in the 'some magic geometrical guide' (which I will not mention the name of here) solution can do, but what about support? When we need support or an urgent security fix, who are we going to call?" Our answer? "Not the Ghostbusters!"
Okay, just kidding – but let me tell you about some of the myths that the closed source firewall vendors teach customers about open source support and how to answer them!
- Open source has no professional support: So, let me tell my story – I've been paying my bills for almost the last 15 years by offering professional support! Deciso is the company that founded and maintained the OPNsense project, and it is a company, not just a couple of genius guys (although there are genius guys there too)! But they are doing an outstanding job as a company! They provide professional services, hardware, and so on. If we look at the open source world, we can see many companies providing support and, making money. Yes, you can make money with open source! Just search on Google for open source professional support, and you will see that it is not a rare service.
- Security fixes/software improvements: Some commercial vendors fail to perform quick security fixes – you can find some examples on Google; some took more than a year to fix a known vulnerability. However, if you repeat the search and use OPNsense as an example, you will see that security fixes are done quickly! Talking about the software improvements, let's suppose your customer asks you about custom features. Try to ask a big vendor to know if you even will be heard! Probably not! I know what I'm talking about, and I used to work with them a long time ago! With an excellent open source project such as the OPNsense project, you can ask (open an issue) or even write code and submit it on GitHub (a pull request). Most of the time, you will be heard, and sometimes after a lengthy discussion and code review, the community will probably accept it! Again, I know what I'm talking about!
So, after this introduction, let's see where else we can find help:
- OPNsense docs: The OPNsense documentation is incredible! You will probably find there a lot of answers to your questions already. So, before you start typing questions anywhere, read the docs!
- Official forum: Always search first in the forums for questions like the one you intend to ask. Maintaining a helping platform, such as a forum, demands a lot of work, so please respect that and avoid duplicating questions. I'm not against WhatsApp or Telegram groups, but they aren't the best medium to get help. Think about it – if you just arrived in one of those groups, you can't see the message history, so all of the effort done before answering questions like yours is lost. Some of my OPNsense course students often ask me about those groups, and I always say, "No! And I wouldn't!" and discourage them from using those groups as a trusted source of information. Please prefer using the official forum!
- IRC: There is an OPNsense channel on IRC Libera (https://web.libera.chat/#opnsense), and you can chat about it there!
- Commercial support: Suppose you are in a hurry or have some critical issue and can't wait for the community to answer. In that case, you can count on the commercial support provided by several reliable companies that support the OPNsense project. As we discussed in this section, there are many ways to get help with OPNsense, maybe more than some of its commercial competitors; this is the advantage of an open source project. You can always count on the community and the companies that support it and are not left with just one option!
This brings us to the end of the chapter, which has provided an overview of OPNsense.
