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160 lines
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160 lines
6.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
============
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Introduction
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============
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Welcome to the OPNsense documentation & wiki project!
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The documentation is work in progress and is updated frequently.
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If you would like to contribute in anyway, please take a look at our guide
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how to :doc:`contribute`.
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.. image:: ./images/opnsense_logo-zilver_grijs.png
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------------------------------------
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Welcome to OPNsense's documentation!
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------------------------------------
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`OPNsense® <https://opnsense.org>`__ is an open source,
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easy-to-use and easy-to-build FreeBSD based firewall and routing platform.
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**OPNsense** includes most of the features available in expensive commercial
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firewalls, and more in many cases. It brings the rich feature set of commercial
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offerings with the benefits of open and verifiable sources.
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-----------------
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Mission Statement
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-----------------
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Give users, developers and businesses a friendly, stable and transparent
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environment. Make OPNsense the most widely used open source security platform.
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The project’s name is derived from open and sense and stands for:
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“Open (source) makes sense.”
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.. image:: ./images/OPNsense-Deciso-Screenshot.jpg
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-----------------
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Reading guide
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-----------------
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While reading the documentation, it's good to know how the various topics are structured, what their purpose is and how
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to find what you're looking for. Maybe even more important is what this documentation doesn't offer.
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If you're looking for deeper insights about networking and best practices in designing them, this might not be the best
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place to look. Most of our documents and how-to's focus on how to use functionality included in our software and/or one
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of it's plugins. Quite some books are written about networking, there are (online) courses available and wikipedia
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contains a lot of relevant articles as well. Some interesting reads include the fundamentals about the
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`OSI model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model>`__, `IP addressing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address>`__,
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`routing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_routing>`__ and `network address translation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation>`__.
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Likely these resources are more suitable for learning about general network concepts.
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Although we do try to include some context in our documents, there are often assumptions made about the readers
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knowledge on (basic) networking.
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Like many products and projects, ours grows over time, functionality extends and changes, which sometimes makes it difficult
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to find what you need for the version your using. Although we try to keep our documentation up to date, sometimes text
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doesn't reflect reality anymore. If that's the case and you think you found an omission, don't hestitate to open
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a report using one of our templates on `GitHub <https://github.com/opnsense/docs/issues/new/choose>`__ or a pull request
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of course if you're able to.
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Always assume the text is intended for the latest version of our product, in time we might
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add a version selector in the documentation, but given OPNsense is a security product, we advise to keep it up to date
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anyway to protect yourself against the latests threats.
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The releases section contains the changelogs for all versions we published over the years, if there are remarks
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for an upgrade, this is a useful resource to collect the details.
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Installation and setup is all about getting you started using one of the target options available.
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The next sections should be quite familiair when working with OPNsense, as they reflect the options in the
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menu of the product. In case you're not yet used to OPNsense, you can always use the search input in the left corner of
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the screen to find your topic.
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Both community and third-party plugins have their own area available, although they eventually register into the
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same menu structure, it's good to know about possible differences between add-ons and standard functionality.
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The level of support may differ between core functionality, as also explained in the "Support options" section,
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feature requests and bugs maybe treated different as well (a lot of questions for a plugin which is being developed
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by a single person, maybe less active than a group of people improving a plugin together for example).
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When it it comes to building software on top of OPNsense or extending existing functionality, the development
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chapter is the one to read. It explains all about our architecture, coding style, how to hook into available facilities and
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much more.
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Some pointers when it comes to troubleshooting can be found in the section with the same name, it explains a bit
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about our issue workflow and some tips we collected over the years.
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Last but not least our documentation includes some pages around project relations, legal guidelines and
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ways to contribute to the project.
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-------------------
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-----------
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Feature set
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-----------
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The feature set of OPNsense includes high-end features such as forward caching
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proxy, traffic shaping, intrusion detection and easy OpenVPN client setup.
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The latest release is based on a recent FreeBSD for long-term support and uses a
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newly developed MVC-framework based on Phalcon. OPNsense’s focus on security
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brings unique features such as the option to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL
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(selectable in the GUI).
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The robust and reliable update mechanism gives OPNsense the ability to provide
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important security updates in a timely fashion.
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----------------------
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----------------------
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OPNsense Core Features
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----------------------
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- Traffic Shaper
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- Captive portal
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- Voucher support
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- Template manager
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- Multi zone support
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- Forward Caching Proxy
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- Transparent mode supported
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- Blacklist support
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- Virtual Private Network
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- Site to site
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- Road warrior
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- IPsec
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- OpenVPN
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- High Availability & Hardware Failover
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- Includes configuration synchronization & synchronized state tables
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- Moving virtual IPs
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- Intrusion Detection and Inline Prevention
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- Built-in support for Emerging Threats rules
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- Simple setup by use of rule categories
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- Scheduler for period automatic updates
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- Built-in reporting and monitoring tools
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- System Health, the modern take on RRD Graphs
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- Packet Capture
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- Netflow
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- Support for plugins
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- DNS Server & DNS Forwarder
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- DHCP Server and Relay
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- Dynamic DNS
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- Backup & Restore
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- Encrypted cloud backup to Google Drive and Nextcloud
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- Configuration history with colored diff support
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- Local drive backup & restore
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- Stateful inspection firewall
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- Granular control over state table
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- 802.1Q VLAN support
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- and more…
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