A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall.
PF is a BSD licensed stateful packet filter, a central piece of software for firewalling. It is comparable to netfilter (iptables), ipfw, and ipfilter.
OpenVPN is a virtual private network (VPN) system that implements techniques to create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities. It implements both client and server applications.
IPFilter is an open-source software package that provides firewall services and network address translation (NAT) for many Unix-like operating systems. The author and software maintainer is Darren Reed. IPFilter supports both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, and is a stateful firewall.
m0n0wall was an embedded firewall distribution of FreeBSD, one of the BSD operating system descendants. It provides a small image which can be put on Compact Flash cards as well as on CD-ROMs and hard disks. It runs on a number of embedded platforms and generic PCs. The PC version can be run with just a Live CD and a floppy disk to store configuration data, or on a single Compact Flash card. This eliminates the need for a hard drive, which reduces noise and heat levels and decreases the risk of system failure through elimination of moving parts found in older hard drives.
Smoothwall is a Linux distribution designed to be used as an open source firewall. Smoothwall is configured via a web-based GUI and requires little or no knowledge of Linux to install or use.
ALTQ is the network scheduler for Berkeley Software Distribution. ALTQ provides queueing disciplines, and other components related to quality of service (QoS), required to realize resource sharing. It is most commonly implemented on BSD-based routers. ALTQ is included in the base distribution of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD, and was integrated into the pf packet filter of OpenBSD but later replaced by a new queueing subsystem.
There are a number of Unix-like operating systems based on or descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) series of Unix variant options. The three most notable descendants in current use are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, which are all derived from 386BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite, by various routes. Both NetBSD and FreeBSD started life in 1993, initially derived from 386BSD, but in 1994 migrated to a 4.4BSD-Lite code base. OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995. Other notable derivatives include DragonFly BSD, which was forked from FreeBSD 4.8, and Apple Inc.'s iOS and macOS, with its Darwin base including a large amount of code derived from FreeBSD.
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD and the current version runs on x86, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V processors. The project is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation.
Tinc is an open-source, self-routing, mesh networking protocol and software implementation used for compressed and encrypted virtual private networks. It was started in 1998 by Guus Sliepen, Ivo Timmermans, and Wessel Dankers, and released as a GPL-licensed project.
OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. The OpenBSD project emphasizes portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography.
Junos OS is a FreeBSD-based network operating system used in Juniper Networks routing, switching and security devices.
The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from the operating system kernel to processes running in user space. This offloading achieves higher computing efficiency and higher packet throughput than is possible using the interrupt-driven processing provided in the kernel.
The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.
OPNsense is an open source, FreeBSD-based firewall and routing software developed by Deciso, a company in the Netherlands that makes hardware and sells support packages for OPNsense. It is a fork of pfSense, which in turn was forked from m0n0wall built on FreeBSD. It was launched in January 2015. When m0n0wall closed down in February 2015 its creator, Manuel Kasper, referred its developer community to OPNsense.
WireGuard is a communication protocol and free and open-source software that implements encrypted virtual private networks (VPNs), and was designed with the goals of ease of use, high speed performance, and low attack surface. It aims for better performance and more power than IPsec and OpenVPN, two common tunneling protocols. The WireGuard protocol passes traffic over UDP.
Router software requires updating to stay secure, this comparison provides an overview of third party options.
