Dan 🦾

I co-founded pfSense. For the last year I've been building its successor. If you run pfSense today, you already know the reasons to look around: development you can't influence, a CE edition that feels like an afterthought, FreeBSD driver roulette on modern hardware, and a config workflow where one bad apply on a remote box means a drive. nfSensei is my answer. Built from scratch in Rust, on Linux, and designed around the things pfSense users actually complain about. Your config.xml imports. There's an importer that reads your pfSense config, shows you exactly what maps over and what needs attention, then applies it. You don't start from zero. You can't brick it from the couch. Changes stage as a candidate, diff before apply, validate through the real engines before anything is written, and auto-roll-back if you don't confirm in time. If a config ever fails at boot, the box falls back to the last good one on its own. The hardware works. Linux base means modern NICs and drivers just work — and the fast path compiles your rules to XDP at 40Gbps. Automation is native, not scraped. Everything the UI does is a documented API call — about 1,140 of them, with a built-in explorer. Your Ansible finally gets a real interface. The VPNs are current. WireGuard, IPsec, Tailscale, and self-hosted mesh — your own control plane, your keys — plus post-quantum key exchange where it counts. The experimental stuff has its own wing. Thirty-plus Labs features behind toggles: WAN bonding that fuses multiple cheap uplinks through a $5 VPS into one resilient pipe, per-flow SLA telemetry with tamper-evident audit chains, GeoDNS that steers traffic by live RTT and load, application-aware QoS, config push to a whole fleet of remote nodes, and an AI assistant on the box that reads your actual interfaces and logs using local models. Toggles are per-browser and can't touch your running config — flip things on, break them, tell me about it. Oh, and there is much more to mention here! Self-hosted, on your hardware, no cloud account, no subscription. It's NOW IN ACTIVE BETA (previously alpha) with about 40 testers, and bug reports typically get fixed in days. I want more people who know what pfSense does well and can tell me exactly where nfSensei falls short. If you are interested in testing please email me: [email protected]. Tell me about your pfSense setup and I'll get you access. Note: Affiliates and employees of Netgate are not invited.