The distribution has been upgraded and improved

Jan 30, 2015 15:41 GMT  ·  By

PfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD that has been built to be used as a firewall and router. A new iteration has been released and the distro now sports the 2.2 version number.

There are quite a few distros out there that focus on this particular functionality, of being a dedicated firewall, but it's not all that unusual. If you think about it, having an OS that uses Linux or a FreeBSD base makes a lot of sense. You get constant support, they are basically impervious to most attacks, and they don't usually crash. What more could you ask from a distribution?

FreeBSD is not usually the number one choice when it comes to building another distro, let alone a firewall, but this is actually a very good solution. FreeBSD has been receiving quite a lot of attention lately, although PfSense has been around for some time and is not exactly a young OS anymore. It's not all that different from a Linux OS and users can easily adapt.

PfSense 2.2 is an important update

Updates to a distro like pfSense are actually more important than the ones for regular OSes because users who have them installed actually need security. It's not a good firewall if it doesn't implement all the latest fixes and improvements.

"This release brings improvements in performance and hardware support from the FreeBSD 10.1 base, as well as enhancements we’ve added such as AES-GCM with AES-NI acceleration, among a number of other new features and bug fixes. In the process of reaching release, we’ve closed out 392 total tickets (this number includes 55 features or tasks), fixed 135 bugs affecting 2.1.5 and prior versions, fixed another 202 bugs introduced in 2.2 by advancing the base OS version from FreeBSD 8.3 to 10.1," wrote the devs.

Also, OpenSSL has been updated to the latest version, a new OpenVPN package has been implemented, a few XSS exploits have been closed, and numerous other changes have been made.

More details about this distribution are available in the official announcement. You can download PfSense 2.2 right now from the official website.