PacketFence: An Open Source Network Access Control (NAC)

PacketFence: An Open Source Network Access Control (NAC)

What is PacketFence?

PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, Free and Open Source network access control (NAC) solution.

Released Versions:

The initial release is on December 22, 2004, and was written in Perl, Javascript.
The latest version of PacketFence is 5.6.0, which has been released on 2016-01-13. This version is considered stable and can be used in production environments.

Architecture Of PacketFence:

Features Of  PacketFence:

It includes following features like,

• Registration
• Centralized wired and wireless management
• Detection of abnormal network activities
• Proactive vulnerability scans
• Isolation of problematic devices
• Remediation through a captive portal
• 802.1X
• Wireless integration and User-Agent / DHCP fingerprinting

Different Market Where It Used:

PacketFence can be used to effectively secure networks small to very large heterogeneous networks.

• Banks
• Colleges and universities
• Engineering companies
• Convention and exhibition centers
• Hospitals and medical centers
• Hotels
• Manufacturing businesses
• School boards 
• Telecommunications companies

Why we need PacketFence?

If you want to efficiently handle guests on your network and breeding ground for computer worms and viruses then you can use Packet Fence.
Here are some uses of it:

• BYOD - It let people bring their own devices.
• It provides guest access.
• Role-based access control.
• For performing compliance checks.
• To eliminate malware.
• It simplifies network management.
• For WIFI offload / Hotspot.

Supported Network Devices:

Here are the most up-to-date wired and wireless equipment supported by PacketFence. Click

Here(http://www.packetfence.org/about/supported_switches_and_aps.html) to see this.


How To Download PacketFence?

1. By using Yum repository
If you are using a RedHat Enterprise Linux then you can use it to download Packetfence.

Create a file named as
/etc/yum.repos.d/PacketFence.repo

Write following content into it:

[PacketFence]
name=PacketFence Repository
baseurl=http://inverse.ca/downloads/PacketFence/RHEL$releasever/$basearch
gpgcheck=0

2. Download the below PacketFence latest versions
packetfence-5.6.0.tar.gz

Download