I had been reviewing pfsense firewall recently. After using an outdated Watchguard firebox for long, we wanted to replace it with something reliable and easy to manage remotely. Previously our NOC team was looking at Endian for a lot of customers but it ended up as a wrong choice of technology with many of the stuff not working as expected and some of the crucial features missing or not working no matter repeated attempts.
Installation of Pfsense is straight forward but can be a little confusing for a novice user especially assigning the WAN and LAN interfaces. But there are lots of step by step installation videos in youtube to rescue. Once you have got the web based GUI, then configuring everything is a breeze. I liked the PPTP feature which many of the s/w firewalls were missing.
Since we liked it a lot we are moving our internal office n/w also under pfsense which means ‘RIP’ for the pretty old watchguard or serve me at my home.
Next firewall in the queue to be tested is Vyatta. No idea whether its going to be too complex but yes, more people are looking in to SW firewall appliances. Greatest flexibility is you can try the best and no need to buy expensive hardware. A simple Celeron machine is more than enough to run the firewall rather than paying huge amount of money for hardware appliances.
Official website: http://www.pfsense.com/
