Olivier Cochard-Labbé, creator of the FreeNAS distribution, has released the specialized BSD Router Project 2.0 (BSDRP) distribution, notable for its codebase update to the FreeBSD 16 development branch. The distribution is designed for creating compact software routers supporting RIP, OSPF, BGP, and PIM routing protocols. Management is performed via a command-line CLI interface reminiscent of Cisco IOS. The distribution is available in builds for the x86_64 and ARM64 architectures (compressed installation images are ~340 MB in size).
The main characteristics of the distribution:
- The kit includes two packages with implementation of routing protocols: FRRouting (a fork of Quagga) with support for BGP, RIP, RIPng (IPv6), OSPF v2, OSPF v3 (IPv6), ISIS and BIRD with support for BGP, RIP, RIPng (IPv6), OSPF v2 and OSPF v3 (IPv6).
- The distribution is adapted for parallel use of several separate routing tables (FIB) linked to real and virtual interfaces.
- SNMP (bsnmp-ucd) can be used for monitoring and management.
- Export of traffic data in the form of Netflow streams is supported.
- To evaluate network performance, the utilities include NetPIPE, iperf, netblast, netsend and netreceive. To accumulate traffic statistics, ng_netflow is used.
- Support for creating fault-tolerant routers from two servers - in normal mode, the load can be distributed to both servers, but in the event of a failure, the first router can take over the load of the second, and the second - the first (binding to the active one is applied virtual server MAC addresses). The implementation is based on the use of the VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) and CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) protocols, implemented using the ucarp package.
- Support PPTP, PPPoE and L2TP using mpd (Multi-link PPP daemon).
- Support for bandwidth limiting using IPFW + dummynet or ng_car.
- For Ethernet, VLAN support (802.1q), link aggregation and network bridges (802.1w, Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol) are supported.
- The monit package is used for monitoring.
- Support VPN: GRE, GIF, IPSec (IKEv1 and IKEv2 with strongswan), OpenVPN и Wireguard.
- NAT64 support using the tayga daemon and built-in support for IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnels.
- Possibility to install additional programs using the pkgng package manager.
- Using dnsmasq as a DHCP server and ssmtp as a mail delivery agent.
- Support for management via SSH, serial port, telnet and local console. To simplify administration, the tmux utility (BSD equivalent of screen) is included.
- Boot images are generated based on FreeBSD using scripts from NanoBSD.
- The system update mechanism is based on creating two partitions on the flash drive: the new version is loaded into the second partition, which becomes active after rebooting, and the other partition waits for the next update (the partitions are swapped). If problems are detected with the installed update, a rollback to the previous state of the system is possible.
- To verify the integrity of the system, a sha256 checksum is stored for each file.
In the new release:
- The system environment has been updated to the FreeBSD 16-HEAD branch and ports as of September 25, 2025.
- Updated versions of bird 2.17, frr 10.4.1 (with the inclusion of support for Lua scripts), openvpn 2.6.15 and strongswan 6.0.1, dnsmasq 2.90, iperf 3.19, lldp 1.0.19, monit 5.35.
- Added support for systems based on the ARM64 architecture.
- The installation image supports booting on both UEFI and BIOS systems. Migrating from MBR to GPT requires a reinstallation.
- The transition from Nanobsd tools to poudriere-image has been completed.
- The package includes: net/vpp, flashrom, mstflint and Mellanox NIC utilities.
- The isc-dhcp44 and dhcprelya packages have been removed and dnsmasq has been used instead.
Source: opennet.ru
