Testimonials

Berklee College of Music accepted the challenge to offer basic wireless internet access to guest VIPs, contractors and vendors. We defined the following design criteria: the system had to be accountable, manageable and scalable, while retaining easy to use, security, affordability - remaining free from litigation.

During this endeavor we engaged enterprise class vendors of Cisco Systems, Enterasys and Bradford Networks. These systems either required a large topology change, which was incompatible with our existing topology or was cost prohibitive.

We needed to step back and re-evaluate our options. The system solution needed to integrate with Berklee's existing Open Source deployment of 802.1x, which successfully serves our Faculty, Staff and Students. We found that the Open Source product PacketFence with the aid and implementation assistance of selected system partner, Inverse of Montreal was the ideal solution.

We were able to fulfill all of our design objectives while coming in well under budget. Our system integration and resulting benefits have been presented at ACUTA and Educause conferences, which brought much acclaim to Berklee. Inverse has become a premiere partner with Berklee College of Music. They are nothing short of an outstanding group, deserving of high commendations.

On the managed equipment, PacketFence allowed us to eliminate all costly P2P activities on our network. It also helped us identify and block network gaming activities. Those improvements greatly reduce our overall Internet bandwidth usage and significantly improve our level of security.

On the Student Accommodations, PacketFence is a tool that we used to implement policies on the usage of Internet or the network. PacketFence enables us to monitor unwanted network traffic like P2P and malware across the network and it gives us the ability to quickly identify and trap the offending computers, thus securing the network and efficiently saves us time and effort to do this work.

Working with Inverse on my PacketFence implementation has been nothing less than exceptional.  I have worked with many companies over the 15 years I have been in the networking field and Inverse is one of the top three companies I have ever dealt with.  The engineers are very responsive, they know their product inside and out and they are willing to go the extra mile to provide me with the solution I need for my environment.  The PacketFence installation I am using has all of the features I need, supports my hardware environment and is customizable enough to adapt to future needs.  I am extremely satisfied with both the product and the company.

When we first looked into a network access control solution we mainly looked into Juniper and Cisco as they are well known for their networking and security equipment.  We were shocked to discover the cost for each product to be over $10,000.  We then focused our attention to open-source software.  We were pleasantly surprised to discover the product, PacketFence.  We setup the ZEN image in our VMware server with ease.  We configured PacketFence for VLAN Isolation as this provides a good foundation for our network access security.  PacketFence also offers device scanning, with Nessus, and intrusion prevention and detection, with Snort.  At this point in time we are in the testing phases using Snort.  We have had success detecting P2P applications that we installed in a controlled environment.  If any questions arise during the install, or configuration, an email to the PacketFence support group will typically be answered in a few hours, which is fantastic since it is free.  We have nothing but praise for PacketFence.  The product has saved us thousands of dollars and has allowed our company to be more at ease knowing we have an excellent piece of software protecting against unauthorized access to our network.

PacketFence is truly an amazing tool. We were able to lab test it and then deploy it into production within month, having almost zero impact on our user base. The product has further enhanced our awareness of network and has helped add additional controls. The code design is well structured and efficiently modularized to allow customized changes without changing the core product, thus allowing upgrades to happen easier. It is a superb Open Source product.

Universities like ours have a huge challenge - how do you secure 20 buildings or more and over 1,000 ethernet ports with a staff of 9 and limited budgets? We can have great firewalls but how do you prevent a hacker from simply plugging into a port on campus and in turn circumnavigate your great firewall system? Network Access Control systems have the promise of handling this but what University can afford another new system that costs more than $50,000? We found that PacketFence does everything we need from a Network Access Control system with a price that was a fraction of a commercial solution. Working with Inverse has made a complicated problem easy. I can't imagine managing a disperse network without PacketFence.