Idea for New Package: PBNJ

mrquintopolous

I just started using pfSense on an internal firewall where I work, and it works pretty nice. Good work guys!

So I had an idea to extend pfSense with the capabilities of PBNJ (http://pbnj.sourceforge.net/). Basically, I think it would be a cool feature to be able to automatically scan your LAN machines with nmap and see changes over time and maybe even be alerted when a machine has a new port open. That way, an admin can jump on figuring out why this happened.

In an attempt to figure out the internals of pfSense and waste time, I have been fiddling with getting PBNJ installed on the pfSense box. Without the ports system, it requires the following steps:

pkg_add -r perl
pkg_add -r <various 6="" perl="" modules,="" around="">3) One of the dependencies, p5-Nmap-Parser is not in the packages, so it requires downloading the tarball, extracting, installing etc. This requires a pkg_add -r gmake
extract PBNJ, perl Makefile.pl, gmake, gmake install, gmake test
Maye more that I subsequently forgot.

Pretty involved, maybe installing ports and going from there would have been smarter. Anyways, I was wondering:

Do people on this forum think that this would be a useful thing to have in a pfSense box?
If so, is installing perl too much? i.e., would it be better to rewrite something similar in php?
Would anyone be interested in making a package / ui frontend for it with me?

I hope to hear your thoughts.</various>

sullrich

@mrquintopolous:

I just started using pfSense on an internal firewall where I work, and it works pretty nice. Good work guys!

So I had an idea to extend pfSense with the capabilities of PBNJ (http://pbnj.sourceforge.net/). Basically, I think it would be a cool feature to be able to automatically scan your LAN machines with nmap and see changes over time and maybe even be alerted when a machine has a new port open. That way, an admin can jump on figuring out why this happened.

In an attempt to figure out the internals of pfSense and waste time, I have been fiddling with getting PBNJ installed on the pfSense box. Without the ports system, it requires the following steps:

pkg_add -r perl

pkg_add -r <various 6="" perl="" modules,="" around="">3) One of the dependencies, p5-Nmap-Parser is not in the packages, so it requires downloading the tarball, extracting, installing etc. This requires a pkg_add -r gmake

extract PBNJ, perl Makefile.pl, gmake, gmake install, gmake test

Maye more that I subsequently forgot.

Pretty involved, maybe installing ports and going from there would have been smarter. Anyways, I was wondering:

Do people on this forum think that this would be a useful thing to have in a pfSense box?

If so, is installing perl too much? i.e., would it be better to rewrite something similar in php?

Would anyone be interested in making a package / ui frontend for it with me?

I hope to hear your thoughts.</various>

Not as involved as you would think. Check out the squid package which in turns install perl. Theres a number of packages that install multiple dependencies and then setup the package. I don't see anything that would change this situation for this package.

Check out http://pfsense.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/tools/pkg_config.xml?rev=1.407 and http://pfsense.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/tools/packages/