Leadership of an open source NAC platform has been transferred to a private firm in Canada that charges customers for installing and maintaining the software.

PacketFence, developed by two Harvard University IT staffers in their spare time, will now be overseen by Inverse, a systems integrator in Montreal. Future development of the platform will remain open source and subject to general public licensing, says Ludovic Marcotte, chief systems architect at Inverse.

Those who have used the software say it saves them money and it can enforce policies without relying on any specific vendor’s infrastructure, making it more flexible and requiring fewer network upgrades to implement.

They also like the open source benefit of having the eyes of an entire community on the software, testing and re-testing it so it is generally stable. And the community also finds bugs quickly and develops new features as real-world demand dictates.

Meanwhile, the first new stable version of PacketFence since November 2006 has been released. One new feature adds support for isolating devices in virtual LANs based on how they measure up in a NAC health check. Before the mechanism to enforce NAC policies were DHCP and DNS manipulation. The software supports Cisco, HP, Intel, Edgecore and Linksys switches. Adapting to other vendors’ switches would be trivial, Marcotte says.

The new release supports 802.1x port authentication as well as WLAN gear made by Cisco. Marcotte says the software could be adapted to support other WLAN gear.

To deal with all these changes the PacketFence Web site has been upgraded. 

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.