[Packetfence-devel] PacketFence ZEN (Zero Effort NAC)

[David L. <da...@da...>]

We're happy to announce the initial release of a PacketFence ZEN, a 
pre-configured virtual appliance designed to make network registration a 
snap!  A virtual appliance, besides being a nifty marketing term coined 
by VMware, is a self-contained OS image that includes everything 
necessary to run a software package.  The image can be be run in the 
VMware Player or VMware Server, both of which are available for free for 
Linux and Windows.

PF ZEN is built on Fedora Core 6 running PacketFence 1.6.2.  Although 
Snort is installed, the VM is not configured for detection (although we 
may support that in a future release).  The virtual disk is configured 
for 20GB, although it is not pre-allocated.

Usage

PF ZEN is ideal for those testing the NAC waters to get up and running 
with little effort.  It works "out of the box" with no modules or RPMs 
to install.  To use the VM, simply play it, login as user root, password 
p@ck3tf3nc3, and run "cd /usr/local/pf && ./auto_ip.pl".  PacketFence 
will be automatically configured with your LAN settings and will be 
ready to run.  Then simply run "/etc/init.d/packetfence start" or reboot 
the VM to start registering users.  Although remote root logins have 
been disabled, we highly recommend changing the root password.

Authentication

PF ZEN is configured to perform authentication against a local file. 
This file, /usr/local/pf/conf/user.conf, is an Apache password file 
pre-populated with the user myuser, password average.  To manage this 
file, use the htpasswd utility that is provided with Apache.  More 
information is available here.  More information on how to configure 
advanced authentication (LDAP, RADIUS, etc) is available in the 
registration primer.

Download

Please consider this a beta release and let us know of any any feedback. 
  PacketFence ZEN is a rather large (781MB) download and is available at:

http://www.packetfence.org/ZEN/PacketFence-ZEN-0.1.tar.gz

A pretty-print version of this announcement (with links) is available at:

http://www.packetfence.org/news_files/4fb9af34d35141341b9a6f7b5844ccd7-10.html#unique-entry-id-10