A new release of the compact distribution for creating firewalls and network gateways pfSense 2.7.1 has been published. The distribution is based on the FreeBSD codebase, utilizing developments from the m0n0wall project and actively using pf and ALTQ. An iso image for the amd64 architecture, sized 570 MB, is available for download.
The distribution is managed via a web interface. For enabling user access to both wired and wireless networks, Captive Portal, NAT, can be utilized. VPN (IPsec, OpenVPN) and PPPoE. A wide range of capabilities is supported for bandwidth limitation, limiting the number of simultaneous connections, traffic filtering, and creating fault-tolerant configurations based on CARP. Operational statistics are displayed in graph or tabular form. Local user database authentication is supported, as well as RADIUS and LDAP.
Key changes:
- The base system components have been updated to FreeBSD 14-CURRENT. Versions of PHP 8.2.11 and OpenSSL 3.0.12 have been upgraded.
- The Kea DHCP server has been included, which can be used instead of ISC DHCPD.
- The PF packet filter has improved support for the SCTP protocol and added the ability to filter SCTP packets by port number.
- IPv6 routing settings have been moved to the 'Services > Router Advertisement' section.
- Part of the base system has been extracted from the monolithic 'base' package into separate packages. For example, code from the pfSense repository is now supplied in the 'pfSense' package rather than in the general archive.
- A new nda driver is used for working with NVMe drives. To revert to the old driver in the bootloader, you can use the setting 'hw.nvme.use_nvd=1'.
Additionally, it is noteworthy that NetGate has stopped delivering the free 'pfSense Home+Lab' edition, which was a variant of pfSense Community Edition with some enhanced features carried over from the commercial version pfSense Plus. The reason for discontinuing the pfSense Home+Lab edition is cited as misuse by certain vendors who began pre-installing this edition on sold hardware, ignoring licensing conditions.
Source: opennet.ru
