I’ve googled, and ran it through chatgpt. Is anyone going to make a video about switching pfBlocker to coreDNS and Threatgate? I can read, and comprehend, but when doing something like this I would rather have a video showing the implementation.
I am going to take a look at it, but not likely I will make a video anytime soon. If someone does find a good video on it feel free to post it here.
Thank you @LTS_Tom. Not in a hurry to make changes to the home lab, and then at work. pfBlocker and Unbound have served me well over the years.
I have an N100 based Mini PC, using pfSense Plus and I can’t access any of these features.
The new GUI is not available for every machine. (If I am correct, mine doesn’t expose the serial number). Threatgate and CoreDNS is only in Nexus GUI
It could be just me, but personally I don’t like the design. (Not a deal breaker.)
You said it. I don’t know why they spent all that time and not come out with a more modern UI. All they did was change the color scheme and pretty much left the layout almost the same.
This was my first thought.
After many years on CE, I finally decided to purchase some licenses for my whitebox firewalls just this week and upgraded from CE to + to gain access to Nexus Controller for managing multiple instances and some other features and improvements, but I’m really not sure I like things so far. Something seems really clunky. It just seems like Netgate is going in the wrong direction on some things.
Also, I have to do some fresh installs on 2 of 4 of them due to a weird network issue after the upgrade where it seems to just kill states, causing network disruptions. So far, I think that has resolved the issues.
I’ve recently spun up an OPNsense box, and I really like some of the things they have done and some of the things not so much.
Just my 2 cents.
The Nexus implementation is not really smooth to setup and does not offer what most modern multi-instance management systems offer in terms of features. I have not been keeping up with the latest from OPNSense but I have pointed out in the past how they are a more frequent on updates but bit slower on security updates.
At youtube.com search “pfsense nexus” you get 3 hits on the row.
The last one Threatgate I was intrested for but didn’t start the free 3 month trail yet.
Cheer.
The “only trust if DNS resolves” features also known as “Do not talk to strangers” was suggested in the pfsense forums back in 2017 by John Todd (CTO at QUAD9)
There is also a service by Adam Networks that has offered this for pfsense for a while
While this method is effective at stopping connections to some IP address used by a threat actor many modern threats use valid domains with either Let’s Encrypt certs and more advance threat campaigns are using Cloudflare. So setting this up is not a bad thing but don’t let it lure you into a false sense of security against current threat actor trade craft here in 2026.
With those videos, they talk about it, but nothing else. More marketing than anything else.