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I never claimed BSD was Linux - only that I used the Linux router. Totally separate project that pre-dated m0n0wall and pfSense, and is now defunct. m0n0wall was started by the same people as pfSense, yes, and it's now officially closed. Chris Buechler is the main guy at pfSense, and a couple of other folks help with answering questions on the forum and writing and updating documentation. It was begun in order to provide a platform that was more feature-rich and would scale to server-class hardware. I used, and still use, ssh for console access whenever possible. Telnet's not at all secure, and ssh has way more features. My office has a static IP, and I created rules in pfSense to let traffic through from that IP on ports 22 and 443...and others, if some special need warranted. I very seldom had anything come up that I couldn't manage through the pfSense web UI.

I used the Linux router, way back in '99 or so. Compiled onto a floppy and booted from that in read-only mode. It was a bit fussy about NICs and had no admin UI, but it worked. m0n0wall was good, but pfSense is truly gold-standard open source software, right up there with the best Linux distros, MySQL, the various Apache server products. I used to have a side business setting up and administering firewalls, routers, IPSec VPNs, captive portals, etc. for small businesses. Needless to say, pfSense was my go-to platform for most of that. I re-branded the web UI with my own logo and colors, so clients thought I was a real wizard.

pfSense is to the point of replacing Cisco equipment in rather large production sites. As you should well know. Before I started with it, I relied on whatever tomato or DD-wrt had going for it, not downplaying them, just required a bit more. Now I use it in three production environments myself, I'm a bit concerned though to be honest, it does it's job so well, I've come to rely on it. Top notch stuff! Been running the nightly since 2.3 was at night lol