Linux-powered Packet Fence Protects Your Network

"PacketFence is a free and open source network access control (NAC) system. This Linux-based application primarily provides network access control, monitoring, and intrusion detection. It gives you several network protection features, which includes the following:

" * Captive portal: Can be used to require users to login before using the network or to present instructions to a user on a web page, blocking all other network traffic, when a problem is detected.
* Malware detection and alerting: Along with internal features, PacketFence can work with remote sensors like from Snort.
* Vulnerability scans with Nessus: Can use the external Nessus program to periodically run vulnerability scans.
* Isolation of problematic devices: One of the several isolation techniques PacketFence support is VLAN isolation (with VoIP support), where problematic clients would be moved to a designated VLAN. Switches from many vendors are supported.
* DHCP fingerprinting: Used to automatically allow or disallow specific device types (such as VoIP phones or Wi-Fi equipped game systems).

"In this tutorial, we'll see how to set up and get started with PacketFence."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Stumbling and Sniffing Wireless Networks in Linux, Part 3(Nov 16, 2009)
• PacketFence 1.8.5 Released (Oct 29, 2009)
• New release of PacketFence(Jul 21, 2009)