PacketFence 13 released

August 9, 2023

The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 13 - a major release bringing interesting improvements!

ACL pre-creation support for wired and WiFi equipment

PacketFence is now able to pre-create ACLs on switches/WiFi controllers for multiple vendors. This allows PacketFence to support in/out ACLs for greater segmentation capabilities.

Redis-based queueing to improve geo-distributed deployments

PacketFence v13 received many optimizations to reduce database writes. Moreover, some write operations are now queued in Redis - which increases throughput and the required latency for geo-distributed deployments.

End-to-end testing framework to UI for CI/CD pipelines

PacketFence now integrates a complete end-to-end testing framework which allows the creation of automated UI tests for our CI/CI pipelines. This is a great addition to Venom-based tests - allowing greater test coverage and improved quality/stability.

Here’s the complete list of changes included in this release:

New Features

• ACL pre-creation support for wired and WiFi equipment
• Redis-based queueing to improve geo-distributed deployments
• End-to-end testing framework to UI for CI/CD pipelines (#7350)

Enhancements

• Refactored all Cisco modules to now use OS versions instead of model names
• Be informed (through security event) when a device pops up into a VLAN or a subnet that shouldn’t be there (#7529)
• Upgraded coredns libraries (#7197)
• Added Palo Alto switch module to manage web admin login using RADIUS (#7643)
• Removed WMI (#7649)
• Allow to call a custom script from pfupdate to handle VIP in cloud environments (#7654)
• Removed IBM provisioner (#7686)
• Removed ServiceNow provisioner (#7699)
• Removed Symantec Provisioner (#7700)
• Removed OPSWAT Provisioner (#7716)
• Removed httpd.proxy service (#7668)
• Removed unused service httpd.collector (#7667)
• Removed Traffic Shaping (#7666)
• Optimized pfdhcp (#7710)
• ISO installer supports UEFI booting (#7724)
• Updated to go 1.20.5 (#7636)
• Documentation to manage HTTP and RADIUS certificates
• Updated OpenAPI Specification to version 3 and improved coverage to all endpoints, including meta OPTIONS and distinct collection sub-types

Bug Fixes

• Removed the use of pthread_atfork (#7538)
• Don’t delete a node from pfdhcp if it is disabled on node deregister (#7525)
• Accurately display the number of registered nodes per role and the overall total of registered nodes (#7471)
• Moved FreeRADIUS refresh to pfqueue (#7620)

See the complete list of changes and the upgrade guide file for notes about upgrading.

This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.