Looking at PFsense as a suitable replacement to clearos

trinimoses

Good day all…

At present we are using clearos 5.2 community for our small office. We have about 50pcs between both warehouses, but it lacks some features that we need.

I am wondering if pfsense can do the following:
1)Bandwidth shaping/management meaning i would like to give voip dedicate bandwith out of our internet pipe line
2)be able to export network report on bandwidth usage over a given period of time.
3)We offer free wifi to our customers who come to visit us for projects etc.. so i was wondering it can manager users of the wifi (we are using motorola APs)
4)offer some level of local dns

These are most of the main features i am looking for...

Can pfsense do these ?

kejianshi

That and more…

I'm not sure what clear OS's traffic shaping is like, but pfsense has it and it works - but its not like 1 single setting where you enter bandwidth you wish to reserve for a given client. Its abit more involved than that, but it works.

johnpoz

I have not played with clearos in quite some time - but all of those features you mention are doable with it that I do know.

It can do captive portal
http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/captive_portal

It has free dns and bandwidth shaping apps
http://www.clearcenter.com/marketplace/

Network report app again free
http://www.clearcenter.com/marketplace/reports/Network_Report.html

So while I believe pfsense is a better overall firewall solution - clearOS is more of do everything type of deployment and can fill the role of many different services for a soho or smb all on 1 box.

trinimoses

Johnpoz there isnt an option to export the network report to a csv file or xls… so i was asking if pfsense has that option built into it.

And the bandwith shaping doesnt seem to work well in version 5.2

johnpoz

pfsense does not have that option AFAIK either - have never seen it. You can view the RRD graphs of traffic, you could install something like bandwidthd, etc. But does not the network detailed report allow you to output to details?

I use vnstat2 package on my pfsense and gives you some tables of amount of data used, etc. But not in great detail - and currently have to jump through some hoops to get it work on 2.1

Grabbing the latest clearos community now and will give it a look see. Like I said its been quite a while since I have played with it ;)

As to 5.2 – Im grabbing 6.4 so seems your quite a bit behind.

edit: Yeah I don't see an export feature on the network full report - but it does do a tabular listing, you could prob cut and paste that? Waiting for mine to fill in some details, etc. I don't have anything on the back end of it yet to generate some traffic.. Will do that later when I get a chance.. But I don't know of anything in pfsense that allows export of that info either.

trinimoses

i left 6.4 downloading in the office.. download pfsense too…. hoping to find a hard drive somehwere in the office so i can install both and test them ..and see who wins out