14 DAY TRIAL // Electric Sheep Fencing LLC., through Chris Buechler, today, April 12, 2016, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the stable pfSense 2.3 BSD-based firewall operating system.
For those not yet aware of what pfSense is, we can tell you that it's a freely distributed and open source, fast and feature-rich FreeBSD-based firewall and router operating system that offers load balancing, unified threat management, and multi WAN.
The pfSense 2.3 stable release has been in development for the past six months or so, and includes new features like a revamped webGUI (web-based user interface) that now utilizes Bootstrap, and rewritten base system and kernel, which have been converted to FreeBSD's pkg format.
"The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past," said Chris Buechler in today's announcement. "The webGUI rewrite brings a new responsive look and feel to pfSense requiring a minimum of resizing or scrolling on a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile phones."
Remains based on FreeBSD 10.3
There are a huge number of small features and improvements added to pfSense 2.3, so we recommend reading the full changelog or, at least, watch the video attached below. For now, pfSense 2.3 remains based on the FreeBSD 10.3 operating system, and there's no word yet on an upgrade to the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 release.
pfSense 2.3 comes as a worthy upgrade to the pfSense 2.2 version announced two months ago, and it can be downloaded right now via our website as installable-only ISO image for 64-bit (amd64) or 32-bit (i386) hardware architectures. Existing users can just use the auto-update functionality to upgrade to pfSense 2.3.