“pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router.” pfSense is a fork of m0n0wall, and uses pf, openBSD’s stateful packet filter.
Origin – Home Page: USA – pfSense
Price: PfSense is Open Source (BSD license), free to use and distribute. Commercial support for pfSense is provided by BSD Perimeter and Centipede Networks.
Comments: The primary focus of pfSense is for use on PCs, but an installer for embedded devices is also available. pfSense provides the full features of pf: CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) for hardware failover support; pfsync to maintain connections on failover; OS fingerprinting via p0f; outbound and inbound load balancing; captive portal; real time traffic monitor; RADIUS and redundant RADIUS server support.
You may view the base features of pfSense as well as that of other distros in the firewall cum router category in the feature overview of Linux and BSD firewall and router distros.
Download The latest stable version is pfSense is available for download as an embedded image or as a CD iso image from this list of mirrors.
I’ve used pfSense for about 5 years now, and I’ll go on the record to say that this is my favorite router platform by far. I tested several different platforms in the lead up to choosing pfSense, but none of the others met my needs so completely.
Particularly, I really love the “pfBlocker” & “Snort” add-on packages. Those two packages combined have reduced the threat level to my network by an extreme degree and allow to me to stop threats before they grow into a full blown problem.
Also, the NAT forwarder rules tables are some of the best I’ve ever used because of the automatic and simultaneous generation of firewall rules that allow an administrator to perform very granular shaping of their network edge security to a degree seldom found outside of Cisco’s offerings… yet not requiring near the degree of training to understand.