pfSense Digest

The last of the 7 developers in attendance left on Sunday, wrapping up 8 days of heavy development primarily on 2.0. If you’re curious and have a lot of time to spare, all the changes are detailed in Gitorious (10 pages worth). 2.0 is in considerably better shape than when the week began, though some work remains to be done. Details on that to come. 

Thanks very much to those who contributed to fund this event!

As Holger noted previously, the pfSense 2009 Hackathon is coming up in less than three weeks. This will be our fourth Hackathon, and each year is bigger than the last. We have held one major event every 12-18 months since the project’s inception in 2004. The last was in October 2007, with pictures here. 

These events have been invaluable to the development of the project. It’s easier to work with people whom you have met in person, and getting together as a group to focus on development makes for significant strides in a short period of time. This year the focus is on the 2.0 release – mostly wrapping up numerous loose ends and fixing bugs, as well as general discussions and planning for the 2.0 release cycle. 

Scott and I have started preparing, getting test networks and equipment in place. Holger and Seth will arrive from Germany and the Netherlands respectively in less than three weeks. Three or four other developers will join as well, for a total of 7 or 8 people. 

We need your help!
The developers are taking vacation time from their day jobs to come, and we want to ensure they won’t have any out of pocket expenses for the event. In years past, we have been able to cover expenses thanks to the donations of many of you.  We again need your help. You can donate here, and every little bit helps. For those with larger budgets, consider our commercial support which offers a number of benefits in addition to providing funding for the project. 

A big thanks to those who have contributed already!

The pfSense team will come together again this year for a week of development in the 2nd week of March in Louisville. The time will be mainly spent on working on pfSense 2.0. You should expect some huge progress on various features and the overall status of this major release. It looks like this year even more developers will make it to this convention (besides the usual suspects that have always been around).

If you want to show your support to the project now is the time to do so by sending a donation to fund the expenses of this years hackathon (mainly food and drinks or even travel expenses if enough money comes together). For details on how to donate check out this site. You can chip in via PayPal here, or for those with larger budgets, consider our commercial support services. 

We also want to thank all the past donors that helped fund this event the last three years. It’s always been a great success, and we look forward to another week of significant progress for the project. 

Thank you!

As 2008 comes to a close, we have many plans for 2009. This post outlines some of the big things coming up in 2009.

• CVS conversion to git – this has been partially in progress for 6 months now, and now that 1.2.1 is out, Bill Marquette is working on getting us converted. This should be done within the next week, and brings a number of development-related benefits which will be detailed later.
• pfSense as an appliance building framework – one of the things Scott and I envisioned in founding this project is to make it into an appliance building framework, in combination with the package system. With 2.0, this has come to fruition. The firewall project will remain as it is today, but we have also set things up in a way that allows us to build appliances such as pfDNS, pfPBX, and more to come. This also makes it easier to build the rebranded versions of pfSense that several companies sell. If your company is interested in selling a rebranded version, we encourage you to check out our reseller subscription.
• Release of pfSense: The Definitive Guide book – this has been a work in progress for more than a year, and should be in print and available for purchase in the first quarter of 2009.
• Conferences – pfSense will be presented at multiple conferences this year. DCBSDCon in February is confirmed, and we will likely also be at BSDCan and NYCBSDCon in 2009.
• Developer summit/hackathon – we’ll be having our fourth annual developer conference in March. This is a full week get together, with 6-8 developers expected to attend from across the US and Europe.
• 1.2.x maintenance releases – We will put out maintenance releases with bug and security fixes as needed, probably into 2010. None will see as significant of changes as 1.2 to 1.2.1, with the switch from FreeBSD 6.2 to 7.0, to avoid the lengthy release engineering process that significant change necessitated.
• 2.0 release – we hope to see the 2.0 final release late in 2009, or at a minimum, be at release candidate status by this time next year. There is a significant amount up in the air with this release, and a lot of work remaining to be completed, so this is a very rough estimate. After getting converted to git, we will be moving 2.0 from its current FreeBSD 7.1 base to what will become FreeBSD 8.0. We expect the 2.0 final release will be on FreeBSD 8.0, though that depends on FreeBSD’s release schedule which is entirely outside our control.

2008 was the most successful year to date for this project, and we look forward to making 2009 top that. Thanks to all of you who support the project, especially our commercial support and reseller subscribers!

Here’s to a great 2009. Happy New Year!