OPNsense

OPNsense is an open source, FreeBSD-based firewall and routing software developed by Deciso, a company in the Netherlands that makes hardware and sells support packages for OPNsense. It is a fork of pfSense, which in turn was forked from m0n0wall, which was built on FreeBSD.^[4] It was launched in January 2015.^[3] When m0n0wall closed down in February 2015 its creator, Manuel Kasper, referred its developer community to OPNsense.^[5] OPNsense has a web-based interface and can be used on the x86-64 platform.^[6] Along with acting as a firewall, it has traffic shaping, load balancing, and virtual private network capabilities, and others can be added via plugins.^[7]

In November 2017, a World Intellectual Property Organization panel found Netgate, the copyright holder of pfSense, used the domain opnsense.com in bad faith to discredit OPNsense, and obligated Netgate to transfer domain ownership to Deciso.^[8]

References

1. ^ “OPNsense core 21.7”.
2. ^ “OPNsense 21.7 released”.
3. ^ Jump up to:^a b “Press release: Deciso Launches OPNsense, a New Open Source Firewall Initiative”. Deciso via PRNewsWire. January 2, 2015.
4. ^ Serdar Yegulalp. “Review: 6 slick open source routers”. cio.com. Archived from the original on 20 December 2017. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
5. ^ Richard Chirgwin (16 Feb 2015). “MOnOwall comes tumbling down”. The Register. Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 12 May 2019. Retrieved 12 May 2019.
6. ^ “DistroWatch.com: OPNsense”. DistroWatch. February 12, 2021.
7. ^ Sharma, Mayank; Drake, Nate (September 26, 2017). “What’s the best Linux firewall distro?”. Linux Format via TechRadar.
8. ^ “WIPO Domain Name Decision: D2017-1828”. WIPO. November 12, 2017.

Further reading

• Upadhyay, Rajneesh (September 30, 2015). “How To Install OPNsense Firewall”. Unixmen.
• Jack Wallen (18 April, 2019) “How to install the OPNsense Firewall/Router distribution”. TechRepublic.
• Stubbig, Markus (2019). Practical OPNsense. Books on Demand. ISBN 978-3-748-10723-1.

External links

• Official website

OPNsense® FEATURES

Free & Open source – Everything essential to protect your network and more

FIREWALL

Stateful firewall with support for IPv4 and IPv6 and live view on blocked or passed traffic.

MULTI WAN

Multi WAN capable including load balancing and failover support.

VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKING

Integrated support for IPsec (including route based), OpenVPN as well as pluggable support for Tinc (full mesh VPN) and WireGuard.

HARDWARE FAILOVER

When you cannot afford downtime use our automatic and seamless hardware failover with state synchronization utilizing the common address redundancy protocol (CARP) to get the highest possible availability.

SD-WAN

For easy setup, configuration and monitoring the ZeroTier plugin can be used to setup your Software Defined WAN within minutes.

INTRUSION DETECTION & PREVENTION

Get rid of the Trojans & CNC bots with state of the art inline intrusion prevention utilizing Suricata and Proofpoint‘s Emerging Threats Open rules integrated. Optional ET PRO (commercial subscription) or ET PRO Telemetry (sign-up for free).

TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION

2FA is supported throughout the system, for both the user interface as services such as VPN.

ROUTING PROTOCOLS

Pluggable support for OSPF and BGP using the Free Range Router project.

WEB FILTERING

Fully integrated web proxy with access control and support for external blacklists to filter unwanted traffic.
Other options include firewall aliases and DNS blacklisting.

INTUITIVE USER INTERFACE

The most intuitive fully responsive user interface you’ll find in any open source firewall with integrated search option.

MULTI LANGUAGE

User selectable language support including English, Czech, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

ONLINE DOCUMENTATION

Fully searchable free online documentation.

WEB APPLICATION FILTERING – SENSEI (FREE & COMMERCIAL OPTION)

As part of our cooperation with Sunny Valley Networks a free version of Sensei can be installed as plugin.
For enhanced features a commercial version can be acquired online directly from Sunny Valley Networks.

AND MUCH MORE

CAPTIVE PORTAL, TCP/HTTP LOAD BALANCER, NETFLOW MONITORING, REST API, and more…

BUSINESS EDITION

The OPNsense® Business Edition is intended for companies, enterprises and professionals looking for a more selective upgrade path (lags behind the community edition), additional

commercial features and who want to support the project in a more commercial way compared to donating. Order your license today direct from our online shop.