PacketFence 3.5

So back in August of last year, I wrote about the previous version of PacketFence that I ran for many years, version 1.6.7 [See Here]

In that post I stated that I would write more about the newer version, well months have past, going to change plans about that post due to the fact that version 3.6.1 is out.

So I will highlight some of the big differences between the versions.

• No more ARP spoofing - Multiple options, including use of snmp traps and port-security, to 802.1x mac security.
• Effectiveness of trapping - Once a client has been identified they are switched to a vlan, instead of having the router address spoofed. It works fast and with less overhead.
• Scale of server - Due to the fact that traffic is not all trunked into the server the server can handle more tasks and is more responsive to the admin requests.
• 3.5 has included many of the components under the control of the PacketFence processes- freeradius being a big one.

Problems that still are being addressed: Xbox 360's dhcp fingerprint is not detected correctly, so that they do not auto-register. Some of the reports still need work as they take a long time to run (some of these have been fixed in 3.6.x)

Features that I still need to try or want to implement:

• Guest Access - PacketFence has a guest portal, this would be ideal to the separate SSID/system currently used on my campus.
• Game system registration form - In 3.6.x there is a self-service form to register Xbox's and other systems that my not auto-register. This would help the manual process done now. 

So this is a quick follow-up to the post from August on my PacketFence install.