pfSense 2.0 Alpha

In the words of its creators:

“pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. 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.”

Our work will be directed towards the 2.0 release. It’s still in alpha stage and is expected to come out in the last quarter of 2009. A lot of changes have already been made to it, like a new shaper, a new load balancer, and a lot more. We have a few goals for the next three months that we expect to accomplish:

(i) integrate ipfw-classifyd in pfSense and make the necessary code changes to integrate it seamlessly in the gui, exposing its functionality to the user in a simple way, while simultaneously keeping advanced options for advanced users;
(ii) Develop some wizards that would make faster and easier the creation of some “default” or “standard” configurations, based on the user needs, and adjust the QoS rules accordingly. The objective of this is to demystify this “black art” concept of QoS and bring it to the mainstream audience. To acomplish this, we will try to build wizards that will allow the user to create standard QoS configurations, while hiding the complexity associated with such process;
(iii) Due to the fact that ipfw-classifyd will be very important to the overall performance of the system, we will need to develop a tool that will allow the test of parallel patterns to evaluate the ipfw-classifyd performance.