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pfSense is a firewall/ router computer software distribution based on FreeBSD. The open source pfSense Community Edition (CE) and pfSense Plus is installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine to make a dedicated firewall/router for a network. It can be configured and upgraded through a web-based interface, and requires no knowledge of the underlying FreeBSD system to manage.


Overview

The pfSense project began in 2004 as a fork of the
m0n0wall m0n0wall was an embedded firewall distribution of FreeBSD, one of the BSD operating system descendants. It provides a small image which can be put on Compact Flash cards as well as on CD-ROMs and hard disks. It runs on a number of embedded ...
project by Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich. Its first release was in October 2006. The name derives from the fact that the software uses the packet-filtering tool, PF. Notable functions of pfSense include traffic shaping, VPNs using IPsec or PPTP, captive portal, stateful firewall, network address translation, 802.1q support for VLANs, and dynamic DNS. pfSense can be installed on hardware with an x86-64 processor architecture. It can also be installed on embedded hardware using Compact Flash or SD cards, or as a virtual machine.


WireGuard protocol support

In February 2021, pfSense CE 2.5.0 and pfSense Plus 21.02 added support for a kernel WireGuard implementation. Support for WireGuard was temporarily removed in March 2021 after implementation issues were discovered by WireGuard founder Jason Donenfeld. The July 2021 release of pfSense CE 2.5.2 version re-included WireGuard.


See also

*
Comparison of firewalls Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...
*
List of router and firewall distributions This is a list of router and firewall distributions, which are operating systems designed for use as routers and/or firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted comm ...


References


Further reading

* ''Mastering pfSense, Second Edition'' Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing, 2018. . By David Zientra. * ''Security: Manage Network Security With pfSense Firewall ideo' Birmingham, UK:
Packt Packt is a publishing company founded in 2003 headquartered in Birmingham, UK,with offices in Mumbai, India. Packt primarily publishes print and electronic books and videos relating to information technology, including programming, web des ...
, 2018. . By Manuj Aggarwal.


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pfsense 2004 software BSD software Firewall software Free routing software FreeBSD Gateway/routing/firewall distribution Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Products introduced in 2004 Routers (computing) Wireless access points