NetDefense is central management for OPNsense firewall fleets. A lightweight agent (NDAgent) runs on each firewall and connects outbound only โ no listening ports, no VPN tunnel needed for management โ and every command it accepts is Ed25519-signed by the control plane rather than relying on TLS alone as the trust boundary.
Operators run the fleet from NDCLI, an open-source command-line tool that also acts as an MCP server, so Claude, GPT, or other MCP-compatible agents can audit configurations, flag anomalies, and run fleet-wide tasks in natural language. There's also a web dashboard (NDWeb) for point-and-click management.
Features include reusable, inheritable configuration templates applied across hundreds of devices, one-command WireGuard mesh networking between sites, scheduled backups to S3-compatible storage, and CLI/REST hooks for GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
NDAgent and NDCLI are open source (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/netdefense-io โ the control plane is SaaS, with a free tier and an Enterprise on-premise option.
Outbound-only agent
On-firewall agent (NDAgent) connects out over TLS โ no listening ports, VPNs, or port-forwards on the firewall
Cryptographically signed commands
Every command is Ed25519-signed by the control plane; the agent rejects unsigned, altered, or replayed commands
Open-source agent & CLI
NDAgent and NDCLI are Apache-2.0 open source โ audit the exact code that runs on your firewalls
AI assistant integration (MCP)
NDCLI doubles as an MCP server so Claude, GPT, and other MCP-compatible agents can run fleet operations
Configuration templates
Reusable, inheritable configuration templates applied across hundreds of devices
WireGuard mesh networking
One-command WireGuard mesh between sites
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