Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

By : Matt Williamson, Matthew D Williamson
Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

By: Matt Williamson, Matthew D Williamson

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for flexible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options, which makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important, compared to other offerings. Through this book you will see that pfSense offers numerous alternatives to fit any environment's security needs. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook is the first and only book to explore all the features of pfSense, including those released in the latest 2.0 version. With the help of step-by-step instructions and detailed screenshots of the pfSense interface you will be able to configure every general and advanced feature from creating a firewall rule to configuring multi-WAN failover. Each recipe includes tips and offers advice on variations of the topic or references to other related recipes and additional information that can be found from other sources. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook covers the gamut of available features and functionality. The first three chapters will take you from a non-existent system to a basic pfSense firewall. The next chapter focuses on configuring any number of the VPN services available, a very important and sought-after feature for anyone implementing a firewall. The following two chapters describe how to configure the most advanced features available in pfSense; features that may only be relevant to the most experienced network admins. Chapter 7 is dedicated to understanding and configuring the "grab-bag" of features that are available in pfSense, but are often stand-alone options and unrelated to each other. The first appendix explains how to use the status monitoring tools available for many of the features. The second appendix wraps up with helping you to decide how and where pfSense may be incorporated into your system and what type of hardware is required based on your throughput needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
pfSense 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Applying basic settings in General Setup


This recipe describes how to configure the core system settings in PfSense.

Getting ready

All that's required for this recipe is a base installation of pfSense and access to the WebGUI. Some of these settings will have been configured during the installation process, but can be modified here at any time.

Note

On a new install, the default credentials are:

Username: admin

Password: pfsense

How to do it...

  1. Browse to System | General Setup.

  2. Enter a Hostname. This name will be used to access the machine by name instead of the IP address. For example, we can browse to http://pfsense instead of http://192.168.1.1:

  3. Enter your Domain:

  4. DNS Servers can be specified here. By default, pfSense will act as the primary DNS server and these fields will be blank. However, other DNS servers may certainly be used. Please refer to the Specifying alternate DNS servers recipe in Chapter 2, Essential Services for more information.

  5. Check Allow DNS server list to be overridden by DHCP/PPP on WAN. This ensures that any DNS requests that can't be resolved internally are passed on and resolved by the external DNS servers provided by your ISP.

  6. Enter a Time zone and leave the default NTP time server as 0.pfsense.pool.ntp.org.

  7. I'd recommend the default Theme, pfSense 2.0's new pfsense_ng. The top menus are now static and won't disappear if you scroll down through the content of the page, a great addition to the UI.

See also

  • The Configuring the DNS Forwarder recipe in Chapter 2, Essential Services

  • The Specifying alternate DNS servers recipe in Chapter 2, Essential Services