PfSense … status?
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Hi there,
I recently had to investigate current software based firewalls, and also stumbled over pfSense. The current (and more importantly the upcoming) feature list impressed me, as there are some features I'm desperately looking for. From reading alone pfSense easily beats all the other free solutions.
However, coming from IPCop, I'm a bit frustrated with projects that look promising but where development seems to be dying.So my question is … how alive is pfSense? I see the forum is quite active, but I'm a bit worried seeing that the name change to 2.0 alpha seems to be one year ago, I fear that development might have stopped for this project as well.
And the other main question: can the current stable version be recommended for production use in a (small) company environment? I'd appreciate comments from people who are doing this, with some notes on (dis-)advantages on the product.
Thanks for your input on the matter!
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Messages about new releases, packages, ongoing developement, etc,
http://blog.pfsense.comAbout the current status of the project:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,20928.msg107520.html#msg107520Apparently focus until now was more on the 1.2.x branch, but will soon after the release go to 2.0.
The development of this project is definitely not stopping in the foreseeable time.Some feedback from people using pfSenses in various setups:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7668.0.html -
So my question is … how alive is pfSense? I see the forum is quite active, but I'm a bit worried seeing that the name change to 2.0 alpha seems to be one year ago, I fear that development might have stopped for this project as well.
And the other main question: can the current stable version be recommended for production use in a (small) company environment? I'd appreciate comments from people who are doing this, with some notes on (dis-)advantages on the product.
I've been a pfSense user since 2006 and so far the experience has been great!
Today I have 7 pfSense boxes working flawlessly, in one of my deployments I had a cascade of 3 pfSense boxes protecting a school with over 500 users at any given time.
Make the shift, I was once an IPCop user after using pfSense I've never looked back.
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The project's development is extremely active, likely the most active of any open source firewall distro.
For one, see stats that Ohloh generates:
http://www2.ohloh.net/p/pfSense"Over the past twelve months, 25 developers contributed new code to pfSense.
This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh. ""Over the last twelve months, pfSense has seen a substantial increase in activity. This is probably good sign that interest in this project is rising, and that the open source community has embraced this project."
Another, go look at the commit logs.
https://rcs.pfsense.org/projects/pfsenseRarely (if ever) does a day go by without multiple commits.
2.0 has been alpha and heavy development status for a while, it'll be promoted to beta by the end of the year, with release sometime in 2010.
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Here is a post from a while back that brought out an IT admin from foxnews.com claiming that pfSense was in front of his db servers…not too shabby.
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7668.0.html -
And the other main question: can the current stable version be recommended for production use in a (small) company environment?
Overlooked this part on my first reply - absolutely, it's great for production use in all kinds of environments. There are (at a minimum) thousands of companies with it deployed in production, from one person offices to environments with thousands of users, and everything in between.
