The schedule has been announced for the BSDCan 2009 conference, May 8-9, 2009 in Ottawa Canada. For the fourth straight year, it includes a brand new session on pfSense presented by Scott Ullrich and me - pfSense: 2.0 and beyond.

This session will start with an introduction to the project and its common uses, which have expanded considerably beyond firewalling. We will cover much of the new functionality coming in the 2.0 release, which contains significant enhancements to nearly every portion of the system as well as numerous new features.

While the primary function of the project is a firewalling and routing platform, with changes coming in pfSense 2.0, it has also become an appliance building framework enabling the creation of customized special purpose appliances. The m0n0wall code where pfSense originated has proved popular for this purpose, with AskoziaPBX and FreeNAS also based upon it, in addition to a number of commercial solutions. The goal of this appliance building framework is to enable creation of projects such as these without having to fork and maintain another code base. The existing appliances, including a DNS server using TinyDNS, VoIP with FreeSWITCH, and others will be discussed. For those interested in creating appliances, an overview of the process will be provided along with references for additional information.

I’m not yet sure what the release status of 2.0 will be at that time (alpha/beta), but it will be the primary topic.

BSDCan is always a great conference at a very reasonable cost, I highly recommend it. The social events provide a number of opportunities for you to discuss the project with us - your likes, dislikes, experiences, etc. and we welcome that.

We look forward to meeting some of you there!