The release of a distribution for creating firewalls, OPNsense 26.7, was published. In 2015, OPNsense separated from the pfSense project to develop an open distribution with functionality comparable to commercial solutions for deploying firewalls and network gateways. Unlike pfSense, OPNsense is a community-driven project with a transparent development process. The source code for distribution components and assembly tools is distributed under the BSD license. Assemblies are available in the form of a LiveCD and a system image for recording on Flash drives (490 MB) (source).
OPNsense is based on FreeBSD code and offers various features, including a completely open build toolkit, support for installation as packages on regular FreeBSD, load balancing tools, a web interface for user connections (Captive portal), a stateful firewall, bandwidth limiting, traffic filtering, VPN creation with IPsec, OpenVPN, and PPTP, integration with LDAP and RADIUS, DDNS support, and visual reporting tools (source).
Based on OPNsense, fault-tolerant configurations can be created using the CARP protocol. This allows for the setup of a primary and spare node that automatically synchronizes configurations and takes over in case of a primary node failure. The web interface for firewall configuration is built using the Bootstrap web framework and Phalcon MVC (source).
Changes in OPNsense include a move to the FreeBSD codebase 15.1, interfaces for firewall rules, network interface assignment, and gateway management being transferred to an MVC framework available via Web API, a wizard for migrating address translation rules, DDNS and automatic allocation of IPv6 prefixes, IPv6 support in the Captive portal, and updates to OpenVPN 2.7, PHP 8.5, and Python 3.13 (source).