Recently the Covid restrictions were eased. This allowed us to have our first real meeting at Waikato Uni room MS4.G.02 after many months of virtual meetings using the NZOSS Big Blue Button web-conferencing system. At the same time this meeting was linked to BBB for on-line attendees.
Rubicon Communications LLC do business with the trading name of Netgate. A major software product they develop is pfSense®.
The pfSense® Project is a free open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router entirely managed by an easy-to-use web interface. No FreeBSD knowledge is required to deploy and use pfSense software. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, pfSense software includes a long list of related features.
While pfSense is a product from Netgate https://www.netgate.com/pfsense-plus-software they offer a free-to-download Community Edition version: https://www.pfsense.org/download/
Roger Hardy delivered a presentation that involved the demonstration of pfSense. Netgate provide hardware for the FreeBSD/pfSense solution. Roger also displayed a suitable hardware platform from PC Engines.
As a follow-up to his presentation, Roger posted the following links...
The manuals for the small boards we use to run remote installs:
https://pcengines.ch/pdf/apu4.pdf
Better details here:
https://www.pcengines.ch/apu4c4.htm
You can even download the schematics there.
Price lists here:
https://www.pcengines.ch/order.htm
These are cheaper than the netgate ones, that can be seen at:
https://www.netgate.com/appliances
The "manual" for PFSense is here:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/
Netgate support prices. Not too bad for a business:
https://www.netgate.com/support
They have a service called "Zero to Ping" where "they will help get your Netgate appliance connected to the Internet and one client on the same network online."