Monday, May 13, 2013

PacketFence 4.0

Well, the Inverse team released a new version of PacketFence. Current release is 4.0. This is a jump up from 3.6.1. http://www.packetfence.org/news/2013/article/packetfence-40-released.html


Highlights from the news release:

New Features
  • Brand new Perl-based Web administrative interface using the Catalyst framework
  • New violation actions to set the node's role and deregister it
  • Support for scanning dot1x connections for auto-registration by EAP-Type
  • Support for auto registering dot1x node based of the EAP-Type
  • New searchable MAC Addresses module to query all existing OUI prefixes
  • New advanced search capabilities for nodes and users
  • New memory object caching subsystem for configuration files
  • Ubuntu packages

Enhancements
  • Authentication sources can now be managed directly from the GUI
  • Roles (previously called categories) are now computed dynamically using authentication sources
  • Portal profiles and portal pages are now managed from the GUI
  • Fingerprints and User Agents modules are now searchable
  • Translated all remediation pages to French
  • Updated Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish translations
Lots of good features listed. I am looking forward to the new admin ui. That is something in the current version which needed help. A heavily loaded system moved slow trying to admin it. 

New search is something which was needed. If you didn't get it quite right the first time you could be sitting a while when waiting for the results to load.

Overall the list of changes looks like a big step forward in usability for the system.

A big gotcha listed in the release notes is the recommendation to start with a fresh install. With the major rewrite it would be difficult to just upgrade in place. See UPGRADE document.

I will be starting my migration in the next month or so. I plan on posting a review once I get my system updated.