Developers guide

Chapter 2

Introduction 2

Introduction

PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, Free and Open Source network access control (NAC) system.

Boosting an impressive feature set including a captive portal for registration and remediation, centralized

wired and wireless management, 802.1X support, layer-2 isolation of problematic devices, integration

with the Snort/Suricata IDS and the Nessus vulnerability scanner; PacketFence can be used to effectively

secure networks - from small to very large heterogeneous networks.

Features

Out of band (VLAN Enforcement) PacketFence’s operation is completely out of

band when using VLAN enforcement which

allows the solution to scale geographically

and to be more resilient to failures.

In Band (Inline Enforcement) PacketFence can also be configured to be

in-band, especially when you have non-

manageable network switches or access

points. PacketFence can also work with

both VLAN and Inline enforcement activated

for maximum scalability and security while

allowing older hardware to still be secured

using Inline enforcement.

Hybrid support (Inline Enforcement with RADIUS

support)

PacketFence can also be configured as

hybrid, if you have a manageable device

that supports 802.1x and/or mac-auth. This

feature can be enabled using a RADIUS

attribute (MAC address, SSID, port) or using

full inline mode on the equipment.

Voice over IP (VoIP) support Also called IP Telephony (IPT), VoIP is

fully supported (even in heterogeneous

environments) for multiple switch vendors

(Cisco, Edge-Core, HP, LinkSys, Nortel

Networks and many more).

802.1X 802.1X wireless and wired is supported

through a FreeRADIUS module.

Wireless integration PacketFence integrates perfectly with

wireless networks through a FreeRADIUS