Download PacketFence 4.0

An NAC system can be used to secure a network environment. This allows, based on pre-set policies, network devices to be automatically blocked if an undesirable situation occurs. Think of unknown network devices of visitors, a worm that is trying to spread or an authorized device that is equipped with a different operating system via a boot flop or live CD. PacketFence is such a nac system, with support for 802.1x and vlan isolation, which allows a network device to be placed in the correct vlan after analysis. For more information, please refer to this page and to the 32nd [In]Secure Magazine, in which an article about this package can be found. The developers have released version 4.0 with the following announcement:

PacketFence 4.0 released

The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 4.0. This is a major release bringing a brand new web administrative interface, several shiny new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use.

Packet Fence 4.0 introduces a brand new modern, fast and responsive web administrative interface. It also simplifies the definition of authentication sources in one place and allows dynamic computation of roles. The portal profiles can now be entirely managed from the web interface, simplifying their definitions and eliminating possible configuration mistakes. Using a centralized caching system, configuration is now propagated instantaneously – absolutely no downtime required!

Here are the glory details:

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 on 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

See the ChangeLog [External] file for the complete list of changes and the UPGRADE.asciidoc [External] file for notes about upgrading.

Important upgrade notice

Upgrading an old version of Packet Fence to v4 will be quite an endeavor. While it’s entirely possible if done meticulously, we suggest you start from scratch and move your customizations and nodes information over to your new installation. Read the UPGRADE.ascii [External] file if you consider upgrading an existing system.