14 DAY TRIAL // PfSense, a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router, is now at version 2.1.5 and it available for download.
PfSense is a free network firewall distribution based on the FreeBSD, it comes with a custom kernel, and a few quite powerful applications that should make its users’ life a lot easier. Most of the firewall distros are Linux-based, but PfSense is a little bit different and is using FreeBSD. Regular users won't feel anything out of the ordinary, but it's an interesting choice for the base.
The developers of PfSense are also saying that their distro has been successful in replacing a number of commercial firewalls such as Check Point, Cisco PIX, Cisco ASA, Juniper, Sonicwall, Netgear, Watchguard, Astar, and others.
"In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution."
"The pfSense project has become a fairly popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a single computer to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices," the developers say on the official website.
PfSense 2.1.5 features quite a few changes and improvement, just like most of the previous releases. For example, a missing DHCPD config section is now handled properly during the configuration upgrade, a regression that broke CARP+IP alias VIP functionality has been fixed, the Pass, Block, Reject, and Interface filters in the Firewall Logs Widget have been fixed, HTTPS is now used for the dyndns providers that support it, resetting the firewall hostname from a WAN DHCP server is no longer possible, a missing qlimit keyword has been added in some shaper rules, and hostnames are now allowed in bulk import since they are valid entries in a network type alias.
Also, the detail field of an alias entry is now encoded before displaying its contents back to the user, DNS lookups on GET are no longer executed, the alias creation links from DNS lookups are now turned into submit buttons for POST, a "Cannot use string offset as an array" error is now avoided if the packages section of the config is missing, and the dhcp6c log has moved to dhcpd.log.
More details about this distribution are available in the official announcement. You can download PfSense 2.1.5 right now from the official website.