[PacketFence-devel] PacketFence v7 - What's Coming!

[Ludovic Marcotte]

Hello everybody,

The 2016 year has been once again a great one for PacketFence. We have
seen the v6 release which brought tons of performance improvements,
flexible captive portal with new interface, logging and auditing modules
and much more. PacketFence did set the bar even higher for the competition.

We prepare to do this once again with the upcoming v7 release of
PacketFence. So far, here is what we plan to include in it:

*

*Database Clustering*- PacketFence v7 will make use of MariaDB
Galera Cluster. Each PacketFence server will hold a copy of the
database and any cluster member detaching itself from the clustered
environment will still work and handle endpoint connections
gracefully. It will automatically resynchronize itself to the
cluster when network connectivity is restored;

*

*Mutli-cluster Management*- PacketFence v7 will introduce a brand
new administrative interface to manage multiple PacketFence
clusters. This new module will provide a centralized interface to
change clusters configuration, perform search operations and
generate reports on clusters of PacketFence servers geographically
separated;

*

*Systemd Integration*- PacketFence v7 will make extensive use of
systemd to start/stop/restart services and it will integrate with
systemd's process notification infrastructure for improved service
checks;

*

*Go Language Integration*- Many of the PacketFence v7 services will
be rewritten using the Go Programming Language. Our DNS resolver,
DHCP listener, IDS integration engine and others will benefit from
Go's concurrency support, native code generation and low memory
footprint. The Go programming language will gradually replace Perl;

*

*IPv6 Support*- Our work on IPv6 will continue in PacketFence v7.
Quarantining of endpoints and WebAuth-based registration using IPv6
will be supported and more;

*

*Administration Interface Improvements*- We will nicely revamp the
Web interface and simplify the current administration modules we have.

Work has already started and it'll keep us pretty busy!

Finally, the Inverse team would like to wish you all Happy Holidays -
let the 2017 year be a great one for PacketFence once again!

Thanks and best regards,