Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Packetfence 4.0.1 - First load

As the summer window of working on projects before the day students return is rapidly shrinking, I needed to start on my Packetfence upgrade. If you read my blog before you may know I am a pretty big user of it.

As I wrote back in May it is a fresh install, no direct upgrade path. Getting started, I loaded up a vm with CentOS 6.4 and started down the PacketFence Admin Guide to install. The install guide is fairly straightforward to follow. There is a section on install which on RHEL/CentOS system you have to add additional repos to get things going.




Great been here, not sure I remember the last one from the last install. Ok no big deal, right? I hit a small roadblock with this one. There is only 1 copy of that repo, and it was down. Argh!

Read some more into the doc:

 Debian and Ubuntu
All the PacketFence dependencies are available through the official repositories.

Ok scrap the CentOS 6 install, load up Debian and lets rock. Everything went smooth after that.

PacketFence install within 15 minutes of Debian system being up.

Initial Impressions:

Web Configurator: Awesome to help get things setup.
New Admin Portal: Awesome, leaps and bounds better than 3.5x, the amount you can change inside the interface is great.  I was editing the AUP_Text and save and refreshing the captive portal with the changes live. (Couldn't do that before.)

System performance: Not in production yet so can't say.

The interface is snappy. The search is great with the ease that you can add on more rules to search for to narrow down the person/node that you are looking for.

Guest management is just what I was looking for.

This is NAC that Excites. Hats off to the Inverse.ca team for this work.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    Nice review about the new major version.
    Seems like you're also moving from 3.6.1 to 4.0.x.
    Did you manage to migrate old data?
    Or will you start from a clean install in production?

    Thanks

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    Replies
    1. I did a clean install. I copied parts of the switch.conf file into the new one so it would know all of my switches from previous. We I migrated it to prod, I change the ip addresses to match the old one, didn't want to touch all the switches to change location of pf server.

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