IPFire is a security platform (router and firewall), which can easily be extended and further hardened with Add-ons. Through these add-ons, a basic IPFire install can be quickly scaled up to a much more complex and customizable system.
IPFire has an easy-to-use package system called Pakfire which is used to manage updates and add-ons.
Major IPFire Add-ons
Anonymity
- Use Tor to browse the internet anonymously
File Server
- Netatalk is a file server for Macintosh computers
- NFS is a file server for Linux and UNIX systems
- Samba is a file server for Microsoft Windows or heterogeneous networks
- tftpd adds a tftp server
WiFi access point
- Add Wireless Access Point functionality to IPFire
Backup
Complex IPFire add-ons which turn your IPFire system in to a backup server
- bacula is a set of tools to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data
- BorgBackup is a deduplicating backup program
- rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync
Communications
- mDNS repeater - mDNS repeater daemon
- socat is command line utility that establishes bidirectional transfers data locations
Mail Server
- Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a mail gateway and file-on-demand scanning software
- fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility
- Postfix is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that routes and delivers email
Peer-to-Peer-Clients
- Transmission, a BitTorrent client with web interface
Security
- Freeradius is a multi protocol policy authentication server
- Guardian - protects against SSH brute-force attacks & brute-force attacks against the IPFire WebUI
- Lynis is a command-line auditing tool for local scanning of system and software
- mdadm makes it possible to create software RAID devices (Part of the core programs since 2014)
- Spectre Meltdown Checker allows users to test their hardware for vulnerabilities
Shell tools
Tools for the IPFire Console or to use through SSH connections
Network tools
- avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery via the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol suite
- bird is an Internet Routing Daemon with support of all modern routing protocols
- bwm-ng is a bandwidth monitor
- dehydrated is a client for signing certificates with a Let’s Encrypt server
- fireperf is a tool for network benchmarking
- fping works like ping, but can be used for scanning entire networks
- frr (FRRouting) is an IP routing protocol suite
- HAProxy - TCP/HTTP load balancer
- Iftop is a realtime bandwidth monitor
- IPerf/JPerf allows you to test your network speed (LAN or WLAN)
- iptraf-ng is a console-based network statistic monitoring utility
- keepalived can be used for virtual services and 1st hop redundancy (VRRP)
- mtr combines the functions of trace-route and ping in one tool
- ncat is a network tool for reading and writing to network connections using TCP/UDP
- nginx is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server
- nmap is a versatile (and powerful) IP/port scanner
- pmacct - monitors data usage (IP-based or MAC-based) down to the client level
- speedtest-cli is a command line interface for testing Internet bandwidth
- stunnel - SSL encryption wrapper
- tcpdump is a tool to watch and control your network connections
- traceroute is a network tool used to follow your packets through the internet
- tshark is a network protocol analyzer and the terminal oriented version of wireshark
Other tools
Tools to be used on the IPFire Console or through a Secure Shell connection
- 7zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio
- ddrescue is a data recovery tool
- firmware-update - flash the latest firmware version onto the SPI flash of the board
- flashrom is a utility to detect, read, write, verify and erase flash chips
- fmt - a simple text formatter
- ghostscript is a Postscript interpreter, PDF interpreter and rendering engine
- git - a version control management system
- gptfdisk - a CLI tool to partition hard-drives with GPT
- htop is a process viewer similar to "top" but with many more features
- igmpproxy is a simple multicast routing daemon based on mrouted
- ipvsadm - virtual server administration
- joe is a full featured terminal-based screen editor
- lcdproc - a client/server suite including drivers for all kinds of LCD devices
- lshw provides detailed information on the hardware configuration
- make - a utility to maintain groups of programs
- mc the good old Midnight Commander; an easy to use file manager
- minicom is a text-based modem control and terminal emulation program for serial communications
- ncdu is a a graphical disk usage monitor
- Net-SNMP is a SNMP implementation and more advanced than the basic snmpd
- oci-cli - command line tools for Oracle Cloud
- rsync is a file copying and backup utility
- stress - stress testing
- sysbench is a system evaluation benchmark
- telnet is used for interactive communicate with another host using the TELNET protocol
- Tmux is a terminal multiplexer for the console
- wavemon is a wireless network monitor
System Monitoring
- arpwatch monitor tool for ARP traffic on a network
- cpufrequtils monitors the speed of the processor via CPU Graph
- iotop is a utility, similar to top command, that monitors disk I/O usage
- mcelog decodes the kernel machine check log on x86 machines
- monit is a small utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems
- NRPE - Set up and configure NRPE server on IPFire
- observium-agent is a client for the Observium network monitoring platform
- Swatch is a simple log watcher. It analyzes log files and can trigger email alerts
- watchdog is a service to automatically restart IPFire in the event of a failure
- wio (Who Is Online?) is a builtin monitoring service for the local network showing connected devices
- Zabbix Agent is the agent for monitoring a host by Zabbix
Proxy enhancements
- Proxy Accounting is graphical web interface for measuring traffic per host/user and the ability to generate bills.
- Sarg is graphical analysis tool for proxy reports, which can be used over the web interface.
UPS tools
Software to gracefully shut down IPFire if a connected UPS runs low on power
- Apcupsd used for APC-branded Uninterruptible Power Supplies
- Network UPS Tools (NUT) - monitoring & control of many uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs)
User Interface Changes
- SideMenu EX is a complex extension of IPFire's Side menus
Virtualization
IPFire as virtualization host
- libvirt a toolkit to manage VMs on IPFire
- Qemu provides virtualization for IPFire, so that it can host guest OSes.
Multimedia
- FFmpeg is a tool for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams
- Gnump3d is a server for streaming MP3- and OGG-files.
- MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia - media server and fully compliant with DLNA/UPnP-AV clients
- myMPD fresh webgui for mpd.
- Shairport is an AirPlay audio player
- TagLib reads and edits the meta-data of several popular audio formats.
- Video Disc Recorder / VDR is a video recording / streaming server for digital TV cards.