pfSense: Open source network firewall distribution

https://pfsense.org/

by lobo_tuerto • 9 years ago

309 185 9 years ago

pfsense.org

kiallmacinnes2• 9 years ago

It's been a few years since I used pfSense (maybe 7 or 8 years?) - when did they become so "commerical"?

(I'm not saying thats a bad thing, I really have no opinion on that, I'm just curious!)

tonmoy• 9 years ago

Looking at the wayback machine it seems that the new "commercial" website was released somewhere between March 29, 2015 and April 7, 2015

Fuxy• 9 years ago

They target the market that can get them the money i guess I don't really have a problem with that since they make the best firewall/router software i ever used.

My home router is basically this https://linitx.com/product/linitx-apu-2c-3nicusbrtc-pfsense-... with a ubiquity wifi AP and it works beautifully and it's rock stable.

oneplane• 9 years ago

It's been a few years like that, most likely a combination between someone getting fired and starting a fork (OPNSense) which risks fragmentation (and maybe a bit more competition), and the company behind pfSense needing a bit more return on their investment.

In the long run, it doesn't matter all that much, pfSense is still 'free' as in beer, and you can still get to the sources, and forking is still possible. Only protection of the name 'pfSense' as a brand has gotten somewhat more intense.

On top of that, they are powered by their hardware sales and service subscriptions, of which the former is probably a more important source of income. It seems they either 'are' netgate, or are a subsidiary, and also partner with ADI engineering. Some hardware seems almost purpose built for pfSense, like that tiny uFW micro firewall, or the modified Turbot board (Intel) with two Gigabit Ethernet NIC's. There also seems to be a uBMC in the works, a somewhat 'universal' BMC with IPMI etc. running BSD as well, most likely pfSense-based. I suppose those would be commercially interesting but not that much consumer-oriented but more the bigger ODM's and OEM's since it requires a bit more integration. So those hardware things are a lot more 'commercial' than the software project ever was. I suppose that naturally overflows into pfSense itself.

Currently, pfSense seems to have been 'branded' as a 'community edition'. There doesn't seem to be a 'commercial edition' anywhere yet, but I can imagine a model similar to GitLab where you have a common core and a paid version with enterprise extras. It also seems to be showing the serial number or platform UUID in the web interface, I guess that's somehow going to be tied into the non-community version of pfSense to use with an activation system for the 'more-than-community' version.

I do believe that there is already at least a special version for VMWare on their 'market' or whatever it's called, and a possibly modified version that runs on the pfSense or netgate branded hardware since it needs special software support to function due to it not being simply a 'standard x86 PC'. The uFW is ARM, so a working ARM version of pfSense is out there too!

Notice: a lot of this is just observation and speculation on my part, but it might help you dig for clues on the interwibble.

feld• 9 years ago

There are over 500,000 pfSense installations in the wild. The creation of a company around pfSense has allowed them to offer real support and hire developers to improve everything from the UI to massive improvements to network stack/firewall and even IPSEC performance. These changes get pushed upstream to FreeBSD, everyone wins.

kiallmacinnes2• 9 years ago

Nice, glad to see changes getting pushed upstream! It's was interesting to hit the site for the first time in many years and see how much had changed and how the project has grown!

I wonder what other projects I used to use have grown this much :)

pyvpx4• 9 years ago

what developers have they hired? besides Neville as a consultant for FreeBSD netstack performance improvements.

dstroot• 9 years ago

Happy user here. I have used this exclusively for the past eight years. It's gotten better as it's got more commercial – better UI, more polished plugins, better features, etc.

amadeuspzs• 9 years ago

Having used pfsense for a good few years, we recently switched to Meraki.

Global infrastructure and Meraki APs just made it easier to go with their ecosystem, despite the licensing costs.

ausjke• 9 years ago

meraki started with wifi-mesh and nowadays it is shifting towards wired network and security mostly.

ShakataGaNai• 9 years ago

Ironic. I just did the reverse. Moved from years of Meraki to pfSense (or Palo Alto Networks at another company). The Meraki WAP's are mostly great, their switches are fine, but their "gateway" devices are terrible. The performance is horrible and their internal tests have proven as much. If you need more than 150mbps consistently, Meraki is going to bite you in the ass.

sschueller• 9 years ago

PfSense is awesome! It runs very well for very little money on your own hardware [1].

You can do so many things easily. For example force all local chromecasts via a VPN for netflix.

[1] https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

sashk• 9 years ago

Agree. I've been running pfSense on HP thin client (T5740[1] with expansion module + gigabit dual port ethernet NIC) and was pretty happy. Cost to me was about $60 for fully working firewall/router.

[1] http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_...

nailer• 9 years ago

Is this 'pf' like the BSD firewall? Anyone more familiar with the space want to provide some detail?

Edit: yeah it is:

The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free software packages for additional functionality.

From https://pfsense.org/getting-started/ see also https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_pfSense

hueving• 9 years ago

Yep, basically a really nice web interface and management system for configuring a pf-driven firewall.

You can click your way to high availability with sub 5-second failovers (even including NAT state synchronization) in a morning starting from no pfsense or bsd knowledge.

lima2• 9 years ago

Last time I checked, pfSense was good at firewalling but bad at everything else security-wise.

- Web panel allows root code execution on the device (every XSS is full RCE!)

- Everything runs as root

- No ASLR or other hardening flags because FreeBSD

- Lots of XSS and CSRF opportunities (probably got better with the new UI)

- Did not replace SSL certificate after Heartbleed (on packages.pfsense.org!)

- No package signing, either (not sure if this is still true with pkgng)

- Did not even have SSL on packages.pfsense.org until one or two years ago

I'm also missing the fq_codel queueing discipline on my home network (prevents bufferbloat).

I still use it since it's awesome, but I hope their security posture has improved since.

Most of the commercial vendors are even worse, but still.

bcook• 9 years ago

fq_codel is on it's way (though, it's implemented in dummynet/"limiters" rather than ALTQ): http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/aqm/

pfSense already has codel, which can be used with FAIRQ.

nalllar• 9 years ago

pfSense already has codel, which can be used with FAIRQ.

That's not nearly as good as fq_codel, which is not the same as using fairq + codel.

Algent• 9 years ago

I also had some very bad experience with pfense performances in a virtual environment.

Under Proxmox any kind of network load have an abnormal impact on cpu load, often almost freezing the host. On esx it's a bit better but at the cost of low throughput.

From what I've read it's an issue with offload/checksum with FreeBSD.

After lots of digging on the subject I gave up and switched to VyOS for my proxmox cluster. It doesn't have a nice web panel but the load of the host is now barely noticeable.

ComputerGuru5• 9 years ago

Yeah, you have to disable tcp hardware packet segmentation offloading.

ChefDenominator2• 9 years ago

My understanding is that vm is still in development. I don't see a download option from the main page.

Psilidae• 9 years ago

I have pfSense running on a hyper-v server; I haven't noticed any problems with it.

wila2• 9 years ago

For VMware use the intel e1000e NIC's, not the default ones that you get when setting up the VM using the GUI.

In order to do so, shut down your VM and edit the lines in the .vmx file with the virtual NIC to look like:

  ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000e"

Repeat that for each NIC.

After that performance should be fine.

Ecio78• 9 years ago

4-5 years ago I used pfsense as internet gateway and vpn for point to point in an office with probably 20-30users. We had it clustered between a VM (on ESXi) and a physical appliance on alix (if I recall correctly, or another of the supported sff appliances). The VM was rock solid while the appliance from time to time was experiencing issues (stuck/memory exhausted I think) up to the point that DHCP lease were not released anymore and the office was de facto unable to work.

I think at the end we just kept the VM running alone.

Kurtz793• 9 years ago

Are there other valid open-source alternatives, possibly Linux-based ?

xenophonf• 9 years ago

Dunno about Linux but OPNsense forked off them a while back. Can't speak about the rest but I know that fq_codel is supported because I use that myself.

(Frankly, I switched away from pfSense because I like the OPNsense developers and surrounding community better. I'm more confident that if they haven't already addressed those defects, they will soon or they'll welcome patches that do.)

throwawaydbfif2• 9 years ago

You probably know, but pfsense is mostly just a nice UI on top of built in networking support in BSD. Linux network support has a lot more features on top of that.

You can do more than pfsense with a plain old Linux box but it takes some dense reading to learn to manipulate the traffic control and routing tables yourself.

The reason why most open source router distributions with a UI are pretty basic is because everyone doing things sufficiently advanced knows how to manipulate the network stack directly and only needs command line

deep_attention• 9 years ago

http://www.ipfire.org/ is Linux based.

jimktrains2• 9 years ago

You don't have to use pfSense, you can use pf directly and just configure the box yourself.

neilalexander• 9 years ago

VyOS, based on Brocade's Vyatta platform (from which Ubiquiti's EdgeMAX platform is also derived).

elahd• 9 years ago

Take a look at http://www.smoothwall.org/.

milcron3• 9 years ago

Just use OpenBSD. They are the upstream developer of pf anyway.

pfsense uses FreeBSD's fork of pf, which is years out of date. They forked in order to add multithreading, ostensibly for performance. But the diff is too complicated to keep rebasing on top of upstream, so they're stuck with a pf from 2009.

Here are a few resources to get you started. You'll learn plenty about routing!

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html

https://www.22decembre.eu/2016/05/27/openbsd-router-en/

Compared to Linux, OpenBSD is starkly minimal. It can be a little bewildering when common programs seem to be missing, but the man pages are outstanding. And the system is very simple and reliable. Config files are almost comically short. My /etc/hostname.re0 config is just five bytes: `dhcp\n`.

dperfect2• 9 years ago

Web panel allows root code execution on the device (every XSS is full RCE!)

I assume this is only true in the context of authenticated sessions within the web panel, right? If that's the case, is there really a lot of damage an attacker could do with RCE in an authenticated session that they couldn't already do with admin access in the portal? I could be wrong, but it seems the security implications would be roughly the same just by virtue of providing a web admin tool with the ability to perform almost any superuser-level action.

nitrogen• 9 years ago

Yes, RCE allows an attacker to install a permanent bot/rootkit/whatever. XSS and CSRS can allow the attacks to occur silently. Put them together and you can get hacked just by browsing the web, without ever realizing it.

gonzo24• 9 years ago

Last time I checked, pfSense was good at firewalling but bad at everything else security-wise.
- Web panel allows root code execution on the device (every XSS is full RCE!)

Mostly, but not absolutely true, and being addressed.

- Everything runs as root

Basically true.

- No ASLR or other hardening flags because FreeBSD

And because SafeStack CPI is a much better solution, and our focus.

- Lots of XSS and CSRF opportunities (probably got better with the new UI)

Work going into 2.4 to basically quash XSS / CARF.

- Did not replace SSL certificate after Heartbleed (on packages.pfsense.org!)

I recall differently, but we were more focused on fixing pfSense and the four releases in that month.

- No package signing, either (not sure if this is still true with pkgng)

2.3 got pkgng, and yes, we sign packages.

- Did not even have SSL on packages.pfsense.org until one or two years ago

I finally had to take these parts over from the previous admin.

If you have more suggestions, I'm listening.

walterbell4• 9 years ago

Don't load images (icons) from a public web server, put the images into the local pfSense web server. It should not be necessary to have internet access to use the pfsense web GUI on a private network.

nickpsecurity• 9 years ago

Can it be configured to use full Code-Pointer Integrity? That would be a nice advantage.

floatboth2• 9 years ago

No ASLR or other hardening flags because FreeBSD

OPNSense (fork of pfSense) is built on top of HardenedBSD, so there's ASLR, PIE, SEGVGUARD, all the things :)

pyvpx4• 9 years ago

it doesn't work very well, even for the little OPN/pfSense do.

tete• 9 years ago

No ASLR or other hardening flags because FreeBSD

I hope I am not going too far here, but ASLR might be an obsolete feature soon.

http://www.cs.vu.nl//~herbertb/download/papers/anc_ndss17.pd...

wslh2• 9 years ago

I don't have such experience. I tried to configure IPSec and IKEv2 in pfSense following the instructions and it never worked with a Windows client. There are a lot of questions related to this on the forums without a concrete/canonical answer.

I like pfSense but I chose it to easily configure usually complex networking stuff, not a DHCP or DNS. We are trying now to configure IKEv2 on an Ubiquiti device using UniFi with a load balancer and doesn't seem to be trivial.

jlgaddis2• 9 years ago

IPSec across multiple vendors is always a PITA.

kogepathic• 9 years ago

Yeah, but that's mostly because IPSec supports so damn many authentication methods, cipher settings, etc.

I've had to integrate with several telcos via IPSec (mobile money processing), and it's always fun to try and figure out what they're saying when all they can do is describe the [incredibly generic] settings in the Cisco ASA WebUI.

Then you finally figure out the ipsec.conf settings to make it work, and they come back to you a month later asking for a copy of your file to give to another company who's trying to integrate.

Sure, how much are you going to pay us? Oh, nothing? Well, I remember how much help you gave us when we were banging our head on the wall trying to figure it out. So, hire competent people and figure it out yourself!

curtipus• 9 years ago

When did you try the IPSec/IKEv2 in pfsense? Prior to, I think, 2.4 you had to go into the registry and do some hack to get around certificate limitations. It's no longer necessary and setup was a breeze for me (and the registry hack worked for me as well). I loosely followed: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/IKEv2_with_EAP-MSCHAPv2

gonzo24• 9 years ago

Prior to, I think, 2.4

2.3 (which got Strongswan), but yeah.

2.4 isn't released yet.

wslh2• 9 years ago

When did you try the IPSec/IKEv2 in pfsense?

A few months ago.

notaplumber5• 9 years ago

If you want a pf firewall, you should probably get it from OpenBSD.. they created pf.

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html

kek918• 9 years ago

We use pfSense at a client of mine and it's great. I didn't have any prior experience with it but I only spent a couple of nights setting everything up. We use it to manage firewall rules and as DHCP server for 2 VLANs.

We've used it for about a year now. Had several power outages. The pfSense box is still running like a champ, no problems whatsoever.

Turns out my client actually wanted an email spamfilter though, but our mail is hosted in another country so I had a little trouble explaining why our internal pfSense couldn't help us there. Oh well.

F00Fbug• 9 years ago

I can't say enough good things about pfSense. I'm running three of 'em and would gladly trash my Checkpoint firewalls to use pfSense, if our parent company didn't mandate them.

I've run it on everything from tiny, Atom-based machines to kitted-out HP DL385s, and even on ESXi virtual machines. It works great in all scenarios.

sandGorgon3• 9 years ago

I always had this question - can something like pfsense be built on linux with comparable performance or is there something inherent to the whole stack that makes this effective?

I have always wondered if building pfsense on a modern linux kernel + selinux + BPF with something like nginx/lua scripting (for addon packages) would make more sense.

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for-linux...

edcastro• 9 years ago

https://vyos.io/ might be what you're looking for.

Dangeranger• 9 years ago

So is VyOS the successor to Vyatta?

It looks like maybe this project forked after the purchase by Brocade.

As a side not Vyatta is the base OS in many of the Ubiquiti Networks routers. It's quite nice for small office/ home office.

sandGorgon3• 9 years ago

this is super awesome. thanks! never knew there was a linux based alternative to pfsense. any idea of comparisons from people whonhave tried both?

tachion• 9 years ago

What's 'more sense'? It seems like you're willing to rewrite and recreate existing and perfectly viable solution to a problem purely because the underlying OS is not Linux. In my world it doesn't make ANY sense - while you'll be doing all of that, I'd be already working on something else, after using existing solution to this particular problem and moving on. However, if you do have a justification for wanting Linux solving your problem, then it seems you might have different problem than 'a firewall appliance' and in such case it may have some sense ;)

yellowapple• 9 years ago

Wanting pf or something pf-like on a non-BSD-based OS is not an unreasonable request, especially considering how awful it is to work with, say, iptables in the Linux world. Having a Linux-native pf would likely be highly desirable when Linux is already required in one's setup for other reasons (for example, if Docker is a dependency for what one's trying to do).

That said, my own general preference is to use OpenBSD (which means having immediate access to pf plus all the other goodies like relayd/httpd, OpenSMTPD, etc.) in all possible situations, and only resort to some other OS (like GNU/Linux) when actually necessary; thus, I can't really relate to a need for things to be the other way around :)

vxxzy• 9 years ago

I use pfSense as a vitual machine to firewall/NAT off my vitual environment. It works great. I am running it on KVM/QEMU and handing off the PCI device to the pfSense VM. Great for managing my environment through VPN.

I've also used this in a retail chain in DC/MD/VA. Each location used pfSense for site-site VPN (OpenVPN). We also used the asterisk package to handle VoIP.

Overall, pfSense is a robust UTM.

jstewartmobile2• 9 years ago

I liked pfSense until it got too beefy for my ALIX board. That forced me to move to OpenBSD, and boy am I glad I did.

Once you grok the syntax, it is so much easier to directly update settings in pf.conf than the pfSense web GUI--especially traffic shaping rules.

That, and OpenBSD has great documentation, decent IPv6 support, and almost everything you need already baked-in.

Here's a basic set of config files for a home setup: https://github.com/BourgeoisBear/OpenBSDFirewall

If you need IPv6 or anything fancy, PM me.

SSLy• 9 years ago

ugh, i wish we could use that syntax on the linux side of the computing world

jstewartmobile2• 9 years ago

Ha! I wish I could find the jwz article where he shared his tale of woe with iptables before jumping to pf.

mhurron• 9 years ago

Syntax differences between pf and ipchains/iptables are why I chose OpenBSD on my firewall so many years ago.

lima2• 9 years ago

nftables (the iptables successor) is really close to the pf syntax. It's awesome.

tasn4• 9 years ago

I recently switched to nftables on Linux and the syntax is great, you should give it a go. I wrote a blog post demonstrating my server configuration. Shameless plug: https://stosb.com/blog/explaining-my-configs-nftables/

ianai2• 9 years ago

Thank you so much for that link! I just set up my first OpenBSD firewall so this will help.

dhess3• 9 years ago

I also happily use OpenBSD on my firewall. Every year or two I'm tempted by pfSense, and each time I'm scared away by the thought of running PHP on my firewall, and other security issues as outlined so well in this thread by lima [1].

The one thing I most envy is pfSense's multi-WAN failover support. I have a USB LTE modem plugged into my firewall. OpenBSD can see the device, I can use it as my default gateway for Internet access, etc. However, I only want to use it when my primary ISP is down, for some definition of "down" (e.g., major packet loss). I want the firewall to detect this condition; switch to the LTE modem as the egress interface/default route; reload a different pf.conf, tuned for the LTE modem; restart ospfd, ospf6d, and rtadvd; and then watch the primary interface until it recovers, at which point the firewall reverts to its primary config and restarts the routing daemons again.

It appears that pfSense supports this scenario out-of-the-box, via "gateway groups" and multi-level tiers [2]. OpenBSD does not -- its multi-WAN support is intended for load-balancing, and/or assumes a carrier-grade routing environment using BGP or equivalent. People have asked for help with this scenario on the OpenBSD mailing lists, and the answer is usually, "this is what ifstated is for, write a script"; which is fine, I guess, but it would be nice if everyone who wanted to do this didn't have to write their own bespoke solution.

Speaking of which, does anybody here do this with their OpenBSD firewall and has a nice, clean, well-documented example of how it works? I once trawled through the pfSense source code to see how they do it, and their implementation was all wrapped up in a bunch of PHP. Yuck!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615724

[2] https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN#Failover

jrcii• 9 years ago

My solution to this is to have my servers' console plugged into a separate switch and LTE router than their ethernet cards so not only do I have a redundant WAN, but a redundant router and switch as well.

pyvpx4• 9 years ago

the bespoke part is "what is your definition of down?". is it 10% packet loss? is it physical loss of link? is it something else? is it a combination? is it 15 seconds of $X or a full minute?

__jal2• 9 years ago

pf's syntax is much easier to reason about than, for instance, iptables.

I find myself writing tiny little scripts to emit iptables syntax from something resembling a pythonic-pf, just because I make fewer mistakes when dealing with it.

notaplumber5• 9 years ago

Netgate/pfSense has been notoriously anti-community, with their own co-founder attacking other projects, including a recent fork called OPNSense.

They've also been very hostile towards the OpenBSD developers, and project. Despite the fact they've effectively built a business on OpenBSD innovations, like pf and CARP, even incorporating the name 'pf' into their trademark having not contributed a bit of code.. n̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶m̶e̶ (but perhaps some hw).

But feel free to keep using it.. no need to take my word for it.

https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

stsp2• 9 years ago

I won't defend their demeaning public behaviour towards OpenBSD. I find it revolting.

But they did make one donation to this OpenBSD developer. They sent me 3 rcc-ve boards which I am still using for development: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/www/want.html#rev1....

They took much more than they have given (which the source code licence allows them to do, even if it's morally wrong). Claiming they never gave anything at all is incorrect.

notaplumber5• 9 years ago

I've edited my post, will remove it if you think it does more harm to highlight their actions than good.

ianai2• 9 years ago

Not necessarily a question for just you, but what have they done, exactly?

cr0sh• 9 years ago

They took much more than they have given (which the source code licence allows them to do, even if it's morally wrong).

I don't want to start a flame war, but if the BSD license allows for them to do this, why is it morally wrong?

That is - how can you complain when the license explicitly allows for this? If you (not you personally, of course - but the OpenBSD project) didn't want this to happen, then the license would need to be changed to prevent it.

Of course then, companies wouldn't be as willing to use the code, as we tend to see with the GPL.

But if companies are just going to take the code, modify it, and not contribute the changes back (or contribute little back), where's the loss by using another license?

If the loss is "but the code then won't be used in the greater ecosystem", why complain when it is?

Again - I'm not trying to cause a flame war; everybody has their license and needs. I'm just trying to understand why there is complaints when code isn't contributed back under the BSD license, when it explicitly allows for this.

Furthermore, I am wondering if there is anything we can do about it, that doesn't cause the kind of ire to rise when the GPL is invoked instead. Perhaps there isn't a solution, but I'd love to hear ideas on the subject.

unethical_ban• 9 years ago

Behavior is one thing, but what is so wrong about "taking" more than "giving"? Isn't the development of a firewall distribution, and the provision of professional services around it, a good service in itself?

Kind of like Greg Hartman fussing about Canonical not doing kernel contributions, as if that's the sole metric for being a Linux distro.

na85• 9 years ago

Isn't being able to take more than I give the entire point of the bsd license?

gonzo24• 9 years ago

I've also reversed my stance on openbsd, and personally apologized to Henning.

But none of that is public before now.

ComputerGuru5• 9 years ago

Eh, I wouldn't use the response to OpnSense against them. I tried the first few "releases" and walked away screaming (this was before I ever used pfSense). Lost configurations, routing issues, locked out of the interface, stability problems, and more. But it looked pretty, right?

AsyncAwait2• 9 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out, I've never heard of it.

Can you provide some links to some of these interactions? Would love to research alternatives if that is indeed the case.

cbuechler2• 9 years ago

To be clear, no co-founder has been responsible for any of that. You're referring to Jim Thompson, who purchased my other co-founder's stake in it.

None of the original people are involved anymore. I left last year for Ubiquiti.

Glad I no longer have to defend things. I'll leave it at that.

trome2• 9 years ago

Uhh, you got on the wrong ship if you think Ubiquiti has nothing to defend, your employer is a constant and consistent GPL violator[1], and due to the constant failures and overpromisiong on features (TDMA in particular) alongside the serious supply chain issues Ubiquiti has had over the past decade, your major customers are dumping your hardware en mass[2].

I don't see Solar or IoT cameras/switches/power strips saving Ubiquiti either, the fiber CPE might buy your company a few months of runway, if supply issues don't strangle it tho.

1 - http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/

2 - https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31113160-ePMP-Elevate

SanDiegoSalsa• 9 years ago

You mean "glad you no longer have to make excuses for your inability to lead the project into the future." The recent changes in direction and actual tackling the hard problems has not gone unnoticed by me / others in the community. Kudos to the current team.

gonzo24• 9 years ago

FreeBSD is our upstream, and we donate quite a bit there.

kylegordon• 9 years ago

Been using pfsense for a while now, and with CARP and system redundancy, firewalling, and twin ipsec tunnels to AWS, it's been great and hugely reliable.

mrmondo• 9 years ago

I've been using PFSense both at various workplaces and at home for many years now, it's seriously fantastic. Feature rich, rock solid and good 3rd party packages.

rdslw• 9 years ago

Guys, they started in 2004. Its 2017 today. hackersNEWS ?

dcow3• 9 years ago

Usually when people mention they run pfSense it means, "I heard pfSense is good for security so I use it". If I get that impression in an interview, GG. IMO it's an easy litmus test for netsec/secops roles. If you can't write a pf rule, there are probably bigger issues. OpenBSD is the way to go.

I also think the pfSense CEO has a massively inflated ego and pays little homage to the roots of his software. Does pf really need a GUI?

edit: clarity.

chrisper2• 9 years ago

Are you saying that people who use pfSense don't know what they are doing?

dcow3• 9 years ago

Not quite. But I am saying I've always found better candidates.

gonzo24• 9 years ago

I also think the pfSense CEO has a massively inflated ego and pays little homage to the roots of his software.

The Netgate CEO is a woman.

(I am not the CEO.)

dcow3• 9 years ago

That only happened late 2015. I'm talking about some reddit comments by whomever was in control of pfSense.

jenkstom• 9 years ago

We've had a lot of success with pfSense. BGP works, IPSEC works, most things work quite well with no headaches. My previous employer used a Watchguard firewall and to be honest pfSense was a much better experience all around.

Except for cloud VOIP. Neither 8x8 nor Shoretel worked worth a darn through this firewall. We even paid for the gold support and opened more than one support case with no luck. It appeared to be a RTSP issue, SIP didn't have any trouble. And it was intermittent. Most of the time it would work, occasionally it would not. Eventually we replaced pfSense with a Cisco router for our phones and it worked fine.

storrgie• 9 years ago

Does there exist an analog to this for switching (particularly an organization that sells hardware)?

stevefeinstein• 9 years ago

I used pfSense for a long time and ultimately the conclusion was it was a 75% solution. It made those 75% things pretty easy to set up and configure. But once you needed something from the 25% you had to dig into the BSD configuration and now had to deal with how that interoperated with the pfSense stuff. Better to just bite the bullet and configure BSD (or linux for some things it does even better) from scratch and get exactly what you want and need.

throw2016• 9 years ago

Unless your needs are extreme in which case you will have networking experts making choices the linux networking subsystem is actually quite good both in terms of tooling and performance.

I experimented with Vyatta which was based on Debian - open source fork now used by Ubiquity networks in their devices, and pfsense a couple of years ago and I found plain linux on its own delivers better performance. The recent series of Ars articles on building your own router confirm this with some benchmarks [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/numbers-dont-lie-its...

widea• 9 years ago

Yet I use Smallwall, the successor of M0n0wall on an old Soekris 5501-70. It is just a firewall, no bells and whistles and therefor very stable.

hobarrera• 9 years ago

You know what's open source and works great as a firewall (also based on pf)?

OpenBSD.

No, seriously. Don't bother picking a third-party repackage of pf, when you can actually get the a secure OS built by people who actually put security above everything else. If you care about security, there's no reason to go elsewhere.

MPSimmons• 9 years ago

Do they have an API yet? Because I hated using it without an API.

bpineau• 9 years ago

Same here.

No API means no automation, no Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt or other kind of scripts. Everything in the head of the person who clicked through the web interface.

Are there automation friendly alternatives?

gonzo24• 9 years ago

I also dislike it not having an API, but we have a strategy now.

xer2• 9 years ago

I reviewed pfSense around nov 2016, it failed on many basic security best-practices, and was rejected for our purpose.

gonzo24• 9 years ago

Yet in the same timeframe US Army Cyber Command selected it to stand in front of their infrastructure.

xer2• 9 years ago

Lol

Bombthecat• 9 years ago

I want something like that in docker :)

hpcjoe• 9 years ago

A fan of pfSense, I've used/deployed it a number of times to customers, and for some previous employer bits. Current version doesn't have an API, but is fine for what I do with it.

I did see people hating on it here, and while I cannot/will not speak to their specific issues, I look at it as a much better tool than the integrated hardware units you can buy online for ~$100USD, with also integrated back-doors, courtesy of the development effort.

I know perfectly well that I could build what I need using IPtables ... but have you used IPtables? I'm a CLI guy, and heck ... I want a GUI for IP tables ...

I've not yet played with the nftables, and frankly, I am looking for a generally simpler model of putting some of these things together. pfSense does a pretty good job of this.

One note on the php on the stack ... yeah, this is a concern for me as well. So I don't generally expose the admin access to the interwebs. And I lock that aspect down pretty hard (only specific addresses are allowed to even connect to the admin port). This isn't perfect, but its far better than setting up a web port, and suddenly presenting the pfSense gui out (yeah, this sorta happens by default if you don't move the gui to a different port, and do some other config).

This all said, it is pretty good for what it does, and a few of my previous customers have bought the support for it directly from the team.

pfSense: Open source network firewall distribution

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