FEATURES OF NEXTFIREWALL

NextFirewall has most of the features available on expensive commercial firewalls and many other features depending on the case. Some of these features include:

• Traffic Shaper
• Two-factor Authentication throughout the system
• Captive portal
• Forward Caching Proxy (transparent) with Blacklist support
• Virtual Private Network (site to site & road warrior, IPsec, OpenVPN & legacy PPTP support)
• High Availability & Hardware Failover (with configuration synchronization & synchronized state tables)
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention
• Built-in reporting and monitoring tools including RRD Graphs
• Netflow Exporter
• Network Flow Monitoring
• Support for plugins
• DNS Server & DNS Forwarder
• DHCP Server and Relay
• Dynamic DNS
• Encrypted configuration backup to Google Drive
• Stateful inspection firewall
• Granular control over state table
• 802.1Q VLAN support
• And many more features...

Some hardware recommendations for installation:

- Virtual Machine:

• Processor: 1 or more virtual cores
• RAM: Minimum required RAM is 1 GB
• Install Method: ISO
• Install Target: Minimum recommended virtual disk size of 8GB

- Minimum:

Can use basic features, excluding features requiring large disk read/write operations such as caching proxy (cache), intrusion detection and prevention (alert database).

• Processor: 500MHz single core CPU
• RAM: 512 MB
• Install Method: Serial console or video (VGA)
• Install Target: SD or CF card with a minimum of 4GB, use nano images for installation.

- Reasonable:

Can use all normal features, but with low load capacity.

• Processor: 1 GHz dual core CPU
• RAM: 1 GB
• Install Method: Serial console or video (VGA)
• Install Target: 40 GB SSD, a minimum of 1GB memory is needed for the installer to run.

- Recommended:

• Processor: 1.5 GHz multi-core CPU
• RAM: 4 GB
• Install Method: Serial console or video (VGA)
• Install Target: 120 GB SSD

Highlights:

• Simple, user-friendly interface.
• NextFirewall has good hardware compatibility
• Many advanced features available on pfSense or other commercial firewalls have not yet been integrated into NextFirewall, so it is currently recommended for households, small and medium enterprises.
• Although a new name in the firewall arena, with a seasoned development team with extensive experience (those who have created success for m0n0wall and pfSense), NextFirewall holds great promise for those looking for an alternative to its predecessor, pfSense.