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http://www.sheridancomputers.com/

Sheridan Computers, Pama House, Stockport Road East, Stockport (2026)

31/08/2026

Why choose an open-source firewall? Free does not just mean free of charge.

It means you are free to choose the hardware, support, and services you want. You are not tied to one vendor's licensing model.

You can inspect the code, modify it and build around it.

30/08/2026

Two years ago yesterday, OPNsense 24.7.3 shipped with a new feature: Snapshots.

Our clients wanted the ability to take snapshots of their firewalls and roll back after a bad upgrade.

So we built it.

The work was contributed to OPNsense, developed further, and became part of the firewall platform itself.

That is an important distinction for us.

We do not just sell and support open-source firewalls.

We help make them better.

29/08/2026

Is pfSense still open source?

It is a question I think is worth asking.

pfSense CE 2.9.0 was released on 20 August 2026.

According to Netgate's own documentation, the corresponding source branch is "RELENG_2_9_0".

Go to the public pfSense GitHub repository and it is not there.

Neither are "RELENG_2_8_0" or "RELENG_2_8_1", despite those also being listed by Netgate as the branches corresponding to those CE releases.

The last publicly available CE release branch is "RELENG_2_7_2". Its last commit was in December 2024.

Perhaps even more interestingly, the public "master" branch was last updated on 31 March 2026.

That is nearly five months before pfSense CE 2.9.0 was released.

Yes, the pfSense GitHub repository still exists.

Yes, the code that is there is published under an open-source licence.

But that is not quite the same question.

If I download pfSense CE 2.9.0 today, where is the corresponding source code for the software I am actually running?

If Netgate says that source is "RELENG_2_9_0", but that branch is not publicly available, how can I inspect it?

And if I cannot obtain the source corresponding to the current release, can that current release reasonably still be described as open source?

There is another part to this which has bothered me for considerably longer: having source code available is not the same as having everything required to reproduce the software being distributed.

pfSense has never been a particularly straightforward project for somebody outside Netgate to take, build and reproduce as an official pfSense image.

But now we appear to have gone a step further.

The current release branches themselves are no longer public.

I have my own view on why pfSense ended up here, but that is deliberately not what this post is about.

I am interested in the much simpler question.

Is pfSense CE still open source?

Because looking at what is publicly available today, I am struggling to see how the answer can still be yes.

29/08/2026

If you pay an IT company every month, could they show you what they actually did for you?

Not just the tickets you raised, the work you never saw behind the scenes.

I have been working on the monthly reports we provide to our managed IT customers, and one number stood out.

This customer has 20 computers under management.

During August, we made 42 remote support connections to them.

A lot of that work is invisible to the customer. Not every remote connection starts with a helpdesk ticket. We might be investigating a problem, responding to something we have noticed, checking a machine, making a configuration change or helping somebody who simply picked up the phone.

That is part of what a business is paying for when it has an IT company looking after its systems.

But the report also works the other way.

It shows outstanding requests and our performance against the response times we agreed with the customer. If we miss an SLA, it will show that too.

I do not want to send customers a collection of green charts every month telling them how wonderful we are.

I want the report to answer two simple questions:

What did you do for us?

Did you do what you promised?

We can do this because several of the systems we use are ones we developed ourselves, including our helpdesk and Sheridan Control remote-support platform. We own the operational data, rather than being limited to whatever reports a third-party platform happens to provide.

Eventually all of this will come together into one report, including the condition of the computers and systems we manage.
There is a consequence to that level of transparency.

If a customer has 50 computers and we have done nothing for them, the report will show that too.

And I think it should.

I started wondering how many businesses have ever received a monthly IT report that contained genuinely bad news about the company producing it.

28/08/2026

Are all Ethernet cables basically the same?

Not quite, and buying the one with the biggest number does not automatically mean you are getting something better.

For most homes and small offices, Cat6 is still a very sensible choice. Cat6a is worth considering for new installations where you want 10 Gb over longer runs, while Cat5e is still perfectly capable for plenty of existing networks.

Cat7 is the odd one out. You will see it advertised everywhere online, but it is not part of the normal TIA cabling category progression, so for most people there is very little reason to choose it over Cat6 or Cat6a.

Cat8 is genuinely fast, but unless you have a very specific high-speed, short-run requirement, it is usually complete overkill.

The right cable is the one that suits the job, not necessarily the one with the biggest number on the box.

Were you aware of the differences, or do you normally just buy whichever Ethernet cable is available?

27/08/2026

Using Arch Linux with a LUKS-encrypted SSD?

TRIM can be blocked by the encrypted device mapping even when the SSD itself fully supports it. That can leave the drive unable to properly reclaim unused blocks and may affect write performance over time.

We have put together a short guide showing how to check whether TRIM is working through LUKS2, enable discard support and configure automatic weekly TRIM.

Full guide:
https://forums.sheridancomputers.com/t/enabling-trim-on-a-luks-encrypted-ssd-on-arch-linux/186

27/08/2026

If you manage UniFi equipment, I would check your updates today. Ubiquiti has disclosed 22 new security vulnerabilities, 21 of which are rated Critical.

Three carry the maximum CVSS score of 10.0 and affect UniFi Protect, UniFi OS and UniFi Talk. The Protect and Talk vulnerabilities can allow an attacker with network access to execute commands without first authenticating, while the UniFi OS vulnerability can allow authentication to be bypassed entirely.

The affected products go considerably further than those three applications. The advisory covers UniFi OS Server, Dream Machines, Cloud Gateways, Cloud Keys, NVRs, UniFi Network, Protect, Access, Talk and several other UniFi products.

We deploy and manage quite a lot of UniFi equipment, so this is one of those security advisories that immediately gets my attention. It is also a good reminder that network equipment is not something you install and then forget about. Gateways, controllers, cameras and access-control systems are computers too, and they need maintaining accordingly.

There is currently no public confirmation that these newly disclosed vulnerabilities are being actively exploited, but given the severity and the fact that several require no existing account, I would not leave vulnerable systems sitting on the old versions.

Ubiquiti Inc. published the fixes in Security Advisory Bulletin 067 on 26 August 2026. If you manage UniFi yourself, it is worth checking your versions and updating affected systems.

26/08/2026

"IT people hate printers" has become a whole personality. Maybe get another job?

I don't have printer problems. Not because I'm lucky, because most "printer problems" are network problems wearing a printer costume.

The classic: laptop on wifi can't find the printer. Setup software searches, finds nothing, everyone declares the printer "haunted."

The printer is fine. Your wifi is on a different VLAN to the wired LAN, discovery works by broadcast, and VLANs exist specifically to stop broadcasts crossing between them. The network is doing exactly what it was configured to do.

The fix takes ten seconds: point the install at the printer's IP. No exorcism required.

Printers get blamed because they're the last device in the chain and the one the user can see. But "the printer isn't working" is usually the network, the driver, DNS, or a discovery protocol that was never going to work across subnets.

Hating printers is easier than understanding broadcast domains. It's just not a substitute for it.

25/08/2026

Your laptop has USB-C. Great.

What can that USB-C port actually do?

That is where things get unnecessarily confusing, because USB-C only tells you the shape of the connector.

One USB-C port might charge your laptop, run an external monitor and transfer data at very high speeds.

Another identical-looking USB-C port might only transfer data and charge your phone.

The cable matters too. Two USB-C cables can look exactly the same, while one supports high-speed data, video and laptop charging and the other does not.

Then you have Thunderbolt and USB4 using the same connector again, with even more capabilities depending on the computer, port and cable.

So plugging something in and thinking "it fits, therefore it should work" is unfortunately not enough.

If you need to connect a monitor, charge a laptop or use a fast external drive or dock, check what that particular USB-C port actually supports.

Same connector. Very different capabilities.

I made the graphic below to make the mess a little easier to understand.

24/08/2026

Can you really switch to Linux and use it every day?

I did about ten years ago, and I never switched back.

There seem to be endless videos and posts about people trying Linux for a week, switching to it for 30 days, or seeing whether they can survive without Windows.

They can be entertaining, but Linux has never really been an experiment for me. It is simply what I use every day.

I own an IT support company, so my own computer has to work. I cannot spend half the day waiting for updates or fixing my computer when I should be fixing somebody else's.

I use Linux for coding (mainly in PHP and Rust), Docker for development, Ansible for managing systems, remote access to Windows, Mac and Linux computers, and pretty much everything else involved in running the business.

I also produce my YouTube videos on it using DaVinci Resolve and OBS.

I used to do that on Windows with Adobe Premiere, but I had constant problems with multiple capture cards and, like quite a few Adobe products in my experience, it crashed far more often than I would have liked.

Moving that workflow to DaVinci Resolve on Linux solved the problem for me.

I do miss Photoshop occasionally. GIMP is not Photoshop, and Inkscape is not Illustrator, but both let me get the work done. What I definitely do not miss is the Adobe subscription, or discovering there was a cancellation charge when I tried to leave it.

Gaming has not been a problem [for what I played] either. I'm not really a gamer though, I don't think it's a very productive way to spend my time.

I did not start my Linux journey with Arch [btw] either. Over the years I have used Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Manjaro and others, and I spent years using KDE before eventually moving to Hyprland.

I stayed on Arch for a very boring reason: it works.

It is considerably easier to install these days than its reputation might suggest, but I would not tell somebody coming from Windows that they need to start with Arch, Hyprland and NeoVIM on day one.

Linux is not perfect and it will not suit everybody.

But after using it for around ten years for work, development, video production, gaming and pretty much everything else, I find all the "can you really switch to Linux?" challenges slightly amusing.

You absolutely can, the real question is whether the software you personally need works on it.

Should you switch to Linux?

If you're happy with what you use now, probably not. The IT consultant in me could start talking about security, privacy, support lifecycles and all sorts of other reasons, but ultimately your choice of operating system is yours.

It's a bit like choosing between jeans and tracksuit bottoms. Use whatever you're comfortable in and whatever lets you get on with what you need to do.

I've made my choice, and after ten years I still have no reason to change it.

Would you switch to Linux, or are you perfectly happy where you are? Let me know in the comments.

Sheridan Computers

31/08/2026

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