pfsense.blogspot.com — pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall LiveCD distribution was released today. Utilizing pf as the firewall basis, this distribution has been 2 years in development and offers firewalling, traffic shaping, clustering, load balancing and a very solid packaging system all managed by a WebGUI.
Oct 13, 2006 View in Crawl 4
doxavgOct 14, 2006
btw, it'll handle more than two links, this just happens to be a more common multi-wan config.
deadbabyOct 14, 2006
I'm impressed. When I saw this I thought "Meh, yet another router project" but upon installing it I'm totally blown away by the options and the easy setup process. I threw together a box out of spare parts and all 3 of my interfaces were supported -- including my wireless card which ironically is no longer compatible with Windows post-SP2. Everything seems to work as advertised so far. That being said... I don't think anyone should rush out and throw away their $50 Linksys routers. They're fantastic for the 95% of internet users who just need basic NAT. PFSense is definitely for us 5%-ers who need the advanced options it offers.
doxavgOct 14, 2006
Chip in and make it a reality, patches are almost always accepted.
lordsnoozeOct 14, 2006
I am yet another user who uses pfsense at home AND in my production environment. I tossed out the old hardware firewalls and in came a real one. The most exciting thing is that I have all this power in the firewall and it's free! Just awesome!
behunterOct 27, 2006
Traffic shaping pwnz.pfSense replaced my crappy POS Belkin router. AMD 900 Duron with 256mb RAM runs it rock solid and, unlike my POS Belkin router, not only can I access the internet while downloading tons of stuff, but I don't have to go reboot it every eight hours.Present uptime is the saturday after pfSense was officially released until now. I've used this since the RC1 and wow.Someone earlier said not for the 95% of users out there, and their right. But if you BT, or do anything to actually USE your broadband to the full extent . . . if you have an extensive home network . . . pfSense is practically a must.
mojo420Oct 30, 2006
that would require a helper app because, from what little i've read, I believe that restriction has much more to do with limitations of PPTP than the firewall... i manage customers with Netscreens and PIXs and neither support multiple PPTP tunnels with the same endpoint and source IP even with "fixup protocol pptp" set. both have official workarounds most of which involve complicated NAT setups (creating static nat mappings or using Dynamic IP pools, etc.). Unofficially of course it does work from time to time but doesnt other times and yes it can often work on cheaper hardware where it fails to work on nice hardware. this leads me to believe that this PPTP over NAT issue must be a product of things that only nicer firewalls have (SPI maybe?, intelligent state/session management?) but i digress... my point is that much more expensive "industry-standard" firewalls suffer the same fate.
dbuckleApr 23, 2007
been running beta 1 for 285 days in live now without a failure on a 2 node wrap board. one word. awsome!hope i can upgrade to the release without taking the cluster down
cybrsrfrDec 28, 2007
Microsoft Firewall will never come close in security. Look at the track record of windows98 and windows XP security problems. Think of this... Microsoft Windows Firewall will run on an Operating System that is over 1 gb in size. Too many potential security issues with that size. It might be okay for a workstation firewall but a serious perimeter firewall should never run on an OS that is that large. Sad thing is that they have the marketing team and money to sell it to an unsuspecting ignorant public.