clearOS Home and Community being an alternative for PfSense Users and other NGFW's that are GUI based

TLDR; I hope you want to grow the userbase and compete with the normal goto products. If not, then please, stop the negative reviews and comments in other forums, and essentially wasting the time of new users and your amazing staff, by making some 'simple and free' changes to your marketing.

https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/clear-losing-ground-to-pfsense

It looks like an age-old question, and I guess the answer is pretty obvious; given that there hasn't been much progress in 8 years, and when evaluating clearOS Home as an actual "Home User" product.

Is clearOS Home realistically always going to be for those with coding knowledge and for clearOS Business users; for use in 'their' Home?


If so, like many others, I will bow out now and not post anymore, freeing up mainly Nicks time; you are lucky to have someone with his ability and drive to nurture those asking for aid.

Please take this from someone who wants to help (if it's wanted, however, I cannot code) to get the home product competing with the usual firewall and home office solutions.
Many competitors are taking advantage of the current homeworking situation and coming out with more specialised products, specifically due to the higher demand generated by the pandemic.
There should also have been some upturn in traffic coinciding with clearPhone's user-base, given their natural curiosity concerning privacy, and with them browsing the OS products and the clever move to include their forum within this one.

Let's be honest. The clearOS Home product has been the cause of many less than favourable reviews and for many years now. Reputation wise, and in my humble opinion, this should be a priority, given the prior paragraph. Despite my research and knowledge of this before moving to clearOS. I still chose clearOS.

You must know that whilst the product is excellent for CLI users; you surely understand the potential of what is in your hands, where there is a serious opportunity to develop a product that will wipe the floor with most, if not all of the others; if you wished it to be, and if you had the coding resource.

Coding resource is quite possibly in a loose-loose situation. If essential, simplified and expected features for the Home / Home-Lab community were implemented, this would bring more of the new homeworking users, the home-lab demographic, ex-users, and would very likely retain this individuals, whilst spreading positivity across third party site's. The key benefits continue with these tinkerer's and coder's bringing more support to the forum and maybe even freeing up some resource. This demographic is widely known to likely help with some of the heavy lifting not only for the actual OS, but bring more Apps and enhancing the feature set, again. Again, if you wished for this.

The USP's of clearOS is its feature set, with the only competition being Zentyal and Uninvention Server.
The Proxy SSL nature of Gateway Management provided by AdamNetworks means you still have a chance to make changes, independently of the box, if something goes wrong with rulesets and without having to expose any ports. (Although this is also probable with the PfSense as it is also supported, however, PfSense users are more likely to not go down the qualified list route.
The base philosophy of the company, given it's focus on privacy.

If this happens to be my penultimate post. Please, seriously consider changing the marketing. Ensure that the additional homeworking, clearPhone user-base and the usual PfSense, OPNSense, NethServer, Zentyal Home and Home-Lab demographic 'know what they are getting and without ambiguity'. You have everything to gain by changing the marketing, and it costs nothing but a small amount of time. This will only lead to positive reviews, lower forum requests and massively reducing the negative reviews from those expecting a "Home User" product, which at the worse case scenario has been and is still being received as fairly disingenuous.

I truly hope this is received as intended and I hope to remain with clearOS and an unexpected turnaround with clearFoundation in making a true "Home User" product.

Thanks, Jon

Can there be a specific clearOS Home/with essentials section?

Hi all,
Firstly my thanks to Nick, who has been very helpful via email.

I genuinely wish there was a specific section for "clearOSHome."

Any stuck home user will look for one. At the moment, as there isn't one, you are presented with what feels like the largest forum index page known to man lol .

After that bewilderment has settled, you start to think about where you should begin to start given the sheer number of sections, so you have to resort to looking at the individual apps that you "think" are causing the issues. You then very quickly realise that each section presents very technical information and clearly more for the folks that are adept in CLI, and not those of us who come from the usual GUI driven platforms like PfSense.

Another Suggestion would be stickies for "where to start" this should include the three apps not to install if you are using Gateway Management in either variant. I am sure more will crop up.

Some issues are not in the "learn more" sections with vital information in the 'documentation' link, so you are now two links deep (when it could be and should be in 'learn more', in my opinion), and other information is buried in sales documentation which no one will ever find.

I hope this is the right place to ask. Thanks

Can there be a specific clearOS Home/with essentials section?

Hi all,
Firstly my thanks to Nick, who has been very helpful via email.

I genuinely wish there was a specific section for "clearOSHome."

Any stuck home user will look for one. At the moment, as there isn't one, you are presented with what feels like the largest forum index page known to man lol .

After that bewilderment has settled, you start to think about where you should begin to start given the sheer number of sections, so you have to resort to looking at the individual apps that you "think" are causing the issues. You then very quickly realise that each section presents very technical information and clearly more for the folks that are adept in CLI, and not those of us who come from the usual GUI driven platforms like PfSense.

Another Suggestion would be stickies for "where to start" this should include the three apps not to install if you are using Gateway Management in either variant. I am sure more will crop up.

Some issues are not in the "learn more" sections with vital information in the 'documentation' link, so you are now two links deep (when it could be and should be in 'learn more', in my opinion), and other information is buried in sales documentation which no one will ever find.

I hope this is the right place to ask. Thanks

Whilst the OP is at the top of the thread, to read the responses in order; you have to scroll to the bottom and make your way up.

I just wondered if the filter could be turned on, so that we can switch between; the current implementation of seeing the most recent responses under the OP (descending).
Or have the OP followed by the first response (ascending order); as if you were reading an atypical (for the west) normal book.
Thanks

prevalance of "Random Mac Address" in devices

Given that all devices including phones can spoof mac addresses with random generation.

Does this defeat GM?
Is the only way to combat this to assign "block all" as the default profile


I can pretty much guarantee that manually assigning IP, and when that fails, clicking the Randomise Mac Addressing will be absolute goto's for teen's and older family members visiting.
Thanks.

edit: I rephrased the GM Business question, you already answered it, but it reads better now.

I have found a few posts concerning geoblocking lists, so I will paste a few links in here after I've narrowed down the useful ones

I understood from your comments; that you could individually add IP's via the installation of the "Egress Firewall" App in Marketplace; thank you for that. As you acknowledged, realistically, we all use appropriate lists.

The reason I never installed Egress Firewall, Is it specifically states that "the exception rules are based on destination port or hostname". No where in the "learn more" does it even mention you can add IP's.


Should I put the ability to manage blacklists into Egress Firewall as feature request?
Where should I post about the text addition in Egress's "learn more" pages, Website changes?


I absolutely agree and understood what clearOS offers with its niche combination of:
Next-Gen Firewall; via Gateway Management product, particularly the business variant $400 , but seemingly not available on home, which includes DTTS: "the blanket IP block overridden by the IP Whitelist feature".

The multiple Servers all readily available via Marketplace, and dependant on your version of home, you get can get Serviio and Plex included.

User Management/ grouping, and by way of flex share you can assign shared or private folders to them
You even have Backup for PC's built-in (again dependant on variant)

In fact, after using PfSense for two years and also testing OPNSense, NethServer, Sophos XG, MerlinWRT, AsusWRT, Zentyal.
The only competitor with a like for like offering is Zentyal.

I deliberately chose clearOS not only given what the company stands for, but it is very clean on the interface. I know you all think the menu's could do with work. It would also be good to also have more theme's.

Thanks Nick

What are you referring to?

Confused. You can block through the webconfig as I mentioned. It is just that it is more efficient to use ipset for blocking and in the past I have done some very aggressive blocking so had big lists.

AFAIK GM does not do IP blocking as it is a DNS product. It will, however, do DNS blocking in a way that the firewall can't.

Please also remember that ClearOS is a jack-of-all-trades solution. It is not specifically a firewall, so some firewall features you may want are not covered by the webconfig. OTOH, ClearOS can easily be configured as mail server, web server, torrent client, file server and so on which dedicated firewall solutions cannot do.

add the ability for viewing in Chronoligical order

Everything is in reverse chronological, which is really odd to me.
Can you enable the filter function for ascending / descending please.

Thanks ever so much

ummmm lol

That's fantastic as a one-off thing, but let's be honest, I'm never going to remember that, and there's no way my wife could do that.

I am concerned I will have to log in to the forum and search my posts anytime I need to append to the list.
Is there nothing we can implement (what I would hope we agree) is a pretty standard default feature normally in GUI?
Or is it that we have to pay $400 for Gateway Management Business for that particular privilege?

Thanks Nick