The original FreeBSD-based firewall distro, pfSense shares many similarities with OPNsense. PfSense describes itself as the most trusted open source firewall. This is a powerful form of deep packet inspection whereby instead of merely blocking an IP address or port, OPNsense can inspect individual data packets or connections and stop them before they reach the sender if necessary. The firewall uses an Inline Intrusion Prevention System. OPNsense implements a stateful firewall and enables users to group firewall rules by category, which according to its website, is a handy feature for more demanding network setups. One of the best features about OPNsense is that it exposes all its functionalities from inside a web-based interface, which is a pleasure to use and is available in multiple languages. In its bid to respond to threats in a timely fashion, the firewall distro offers weekly security updates. The firewall distro is designed to serve as a firewall and routing platform and besides filtering traffic can also be used to display a captive portal, shape traffic, detect and prevent intrusions, as well as setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN), and lots more. Instead of using Linux, OPNsense is powered by HardenedBSD, which is a security oriented fork of FreeBSD. OPNSense is derived from the efforts of two mature open source projects, namely pfSense and m0n0wall. The distro can also be fleshed out using a handy set of add-ons to give it additional functionalities. No traffic can pass from red to any other segment unless you have specifically configured it that way in the firewall.īesides its firewalling features, IPFire also has intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, and can also be used to offer VPN facilities. The green segment is a safe area representing all normal clients connected to the local wired network. The installation process allows you to configure your network into different security segments, with each segment being color-coded.

Owing to its minimalist nature, IPFire is more approachable compared to some of its peers. IPFire can be deployed on a wide variety of hardware, including ARM devices such as the Raspberry Pi. It began as a fork of the IPCop project, but has since been rewritten based on Linux From Scratch. IPFire is a Linux-based stateful firewall distro that’s built on top of Netfilter.

Firewall pfsense hardware