These days I’ve looked at the tweets of Scott Ullrich and what catch my attention is the mentioning of pfCenter several times.
As written here:
and here
After I have took a look at the shred screen shots from his image gallery.
There is even a thread in the forum with obscure information: Next Gen of pfSense <—> pfCenter
My suspicion is that this center will perform tasks similar to Astaro Command Center.
There will be a Real-Time Monitoring, Site-to-Site VPN configuration for multiple sites made quick and easy. We can hope for centralisation of Device Maintenance tasks such as firmware upgrades and configurations propagation, some kind of Inventory Management component that can show us what, where and in what state we have. Access Management so you must know only one set of credentials to manage all hooked up devices. I really do hope that there will be some form of Aggregated Reporting functionality, RRD is great for some purposes, but alone is not enough and NTOP is great but a dedicated appliance is better suited for it alone.
The next logical question is where you would you place such thing?
On a pfSense box, might be, but a dedicate Appliance sounds more reasonable, taking into account the amount of data and load, that such a solution could generate. As alternative a Virtual Appliance sounds as a good idea. Last but not least as an option is a service in the cloud, a hosted multi-tenant installation of the pfCenter. Which of these alternatives will be the one we’ll see?
Until then, take a look at the teasers:
The source of these images is Scott Ullrich twitpic gallery.