pfSense Digest

New version posted. Get it from a mirror near you.

New to 0.73:

• Alert system will show you vital information at the top of the page. Click on the event to acknowledge it
• PPPoE server. Currently locked to 16 ips but this will change soon.
• Reverse captive portal on WAN (allow all traffic and enable captive portal for WAN. New visitors will be redirected to AUTH)
• Multi WAN DHCP definitely works now
• Added ral, ural and wai wireless interfaces to webConfigurator code
• Correct channel 0 usage (AUTO)
• Hide SSID wireless option
• Wireless Transmit Power control

We have one week until the hackathon. If you can, please test pfSense this week like you have not tested anything before. We need to nail down the remaining bugs before we start adding a lot more features this weekend.

Shortly after the hackathon we’ll go on one last crusade to eliminate the remaining bugs and stamp a beta 1 release.

If you where considering submitting something now is the time to do it. Once we reach beta status no new features are going to be added to the beta tree.

Happy bug hunting, lets get ‘em!

Exciting new features in 0.71, lets get right down to it:

• All reboots have been removed – if you find one let me know
• Bridging now works again
• More theme cleanups
• XMLRPC syncing of configurations now fixed
• Many, many more things.
• WRAP version updated

Let us know what you think.

We’re now ready to deploy our mirrors, with the infrastructure ready and in place. Today I emailed the people who have offered in the past. If you have offered and did not receive an email from me today, please email me.

From our past posts, we have had a few offers, but we could use some more. At this point, we need offers in any country.

To qualify for mirroring, you need:

• Reliable hosting
• At least a full T1 (1.54 Mbps) of upload bandwidth (won’t take up nearly that much, but we don’t want slow mirrors)
• Static IP address
• Shell and cron access so you can run a rsync from our site
• At least 200 MB of available disk space (117 MB right now, and we will keep the mirrors folder clean with only the most recent downloads)

If you meet the above requirements and would like to help us out, please check out this url and email me.

*UPDATE by sullrich 9:59PM EST – We have already deployed 4 mirrors! Check the downloads area for more information*

0.70.8 is now posted. Let us know what you think.

So much new stuff in 0.70.2, so little time to type. Just start playing already!

• New XHTML/CSS default theme
• Themes support. Start making themes and submit them to us!!
• IPSEC-Tools racoon is now imported
• Dynamic DNS IPSEC!
• Virtual IP manager – unifies carp and proxyarp
• New alert system
• Faster Traffic Shaper configuration generation on backend
• Fixed Dynamic DNS client
• WRAP version works again

Amazing new things up in 0.70..

Bill commited some awesome new code:

CARP, ProxyARP and the useless “Server NAT” (which just tells the system about IPs to use for NAT and does nothing) are now merged under one screen that should be much better. In the process I broke ProxyARP ranges (ie ARP for 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.5), is anyone actually using this feature? Any complaints if I deprecate it in favor of just using CIDR notation (yeah, I know that might suck for things like 10.0.0.1 – 10.0.0.5, but it’s already required for rules)?

The config file bump will auto-convert your CARP/ProxyARP configs to the new layout (including anyone using ranges – although the GUI code for modifying ranges is currently disabled). But please check it out and report bugs, I’m sure I’ve screwed something up somewhere.

Also, welcome our newest commiter Erik Kristensen who has rewritten the ez-ipupdate client in native php!

We just got done posting 0.69.8. Theres a few new treats:

• Reloads the rules in the background on Apply operations. Watch the GUI fly.
• DHCP support for all optional interfaces. Warning, this needs major testing!
• Lots of small bug fixes.

Give it a try!

I’ve been asked recently many times how a person or organization can donate to pfSense. Well right now is the perfect time as we have a Hackathon planned for August 12-14th that we could really use some help in raising funding to help pay for airplane tickets and hotel rooms for about 4 people. During this Hackathon we should have the time to really knock out some amazing stuff. It’ll be worth it.

Please send money to paypal@chrisbuechler.com or contact coreteam@pfsense.com if you would wish to help out with this effort.

UPDATE: 07/09/05 — We have received a few contributions already! Thank you! We will be posting the contributors in a few days. Keep the love flowing in so we can all hack together in person

We’ve been hard at work making the GUI a little more attractive and further trying to differentiate ourselves from m0n0wall. Expect some odd looking things (screens don’t look exactly right cosmetically) from time to time.