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projects/OPNsense/Initial-Notes/OPNsense-approxminated-service-time.md

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+---
+title: "OPNsense - Maintenance time estimate"
+author: Petar Cubela
+date: July 03, 2024
+geometry: margin=1.5cm
+output: pdf_document
+---
+
+## Intro
+
+Let us roughly calculate the time needed to maintain a OPNsesne firewall.
+Here we assumer that the firewall is already configured. Thus we are looking at standard maintenance of the device.
+
+## OPNcentral
+
+We are using OPNcentral which is able to monitor arbitrary numbers of OPNsense firewalls: 
+
+- it manually/automatically creates backups of all integrated firewalls 
+- backups can be read and compared for any firewall integrated in OPNcentral
+- firmware, services and resources status of each OPNsense firewall can be managed via OPNcentral
+- plugin configuration can be managed and send to each firewall via OPNcentral 
+
+## Time Consumption
+
+- updates have to been done regularly which can be checked and updated for all firewalls simultaneously via OPNcentral (~ 1h per month for all firewalls!)
+- in general the firewall will run flawlessly once setup without much interaction as long as nothing complicated has to be changed. 
+- changes in the configuration for known features should be in general simple (~1h per month for all firewalls!)
+- changes for new plugins should take longer depending on the plugin but happens seldom (few/many days depending on plugin once each half year)
+- OpenVPN integration is better integrated in Sophos. We will probably need to export the client configuration for each user (~ 1h per week for each firewall, depending on the number of users requiring vpn)
+
+- there can be unexpected problems with the firewall in production use which we have to test and can not assess pre-usage (~ 1h per month a firewall)
+
+### Estimation
+
+- ~ 1h/month for updates
+- ~ 1h/month for small config changes
+- ~ up to days for configuring new desired plugins. happens once per year/half year?
+- ~ 1h/month for vpn client export
+- ~ 1h/month for unexpected issues/tickets 
+
+Which summarizes to **~ 4 hours per month** and more when new not-so-known plugins have to be configured.
+
+