PacketFence v7 - What's Coming!

December 12, 2016

The 2016 year has been once again a great one for PacketFence. We have seen the v6 release which brought tons of performance improvements, flexible captive portal with new interface, logging and auditing modules and much more. PacketFence did set the bar even higher for the competition.

We prepare to do this once again with the upcoming v7 release of PacketFence. So far, here is what we plan to include in it:

• Database Clustering - PacketFence v7 will make use of MariaDB Galera Cluster. Each PacketFence server will hold a copy of the database and any cluster member detaching itself from the clustered environment will still work and handle endpoint connections gracefully. It will automatically resynchronize itself to the cluster when network connectivity is restored;
• Mutli-cluster Management - PacketFence v7 will introduce a brand new administrative interface to manage multiple PacketFence clusters. This new module will provide a centralized interface to change clusters configuration, perform search operations and generate reports on clusters of PacketFence servers geographically separated;
• Systemd Integration - PacketFence v7 will make extensive use of systemd to start/stop/restart services and it will integrate with systemd’s process notification infrastructure for improved service checks;
• Go Language Integration - Many of the PacketFence v7 services will be rewritten using the Go Programming Language. Our DNS resolver, DHCP listener, IDS integration engine and others will benefit from Go’s concurrency support, native code generation and low memory footprint. The Go programming language will gradually replace Perl;
• IPv6 Support - Our work on IPv6 will continue in PacketFence v7. Quarantining of endpoints and WebAuth-based registration using IPv6 will be supported and more;
• Administration Interface Improvements - We will nicely revamp the Web interface and simplify the current administration modules we have.

Work has already started and it’ll keep us pretty busy!

Finally, the Inverse team would like to wish you all Happy Holidays - let the 2017 year be a great one for PacketFence once again!