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

Configuring the LAN interface


This recipe describes how to configure the Local Area Network (LAN) internal interface of our firewall.

Getting ready

The LAN interface is used to connect your devices to a secure internal network. A properly configured LAN interface is required.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to Interfaces | LAN.

  2. Check Enable Interface.

  3. Choose an address configuration Type.

  4. Enter an IP address and subnet mask. Leave Gateway set to None.

  5. Ensure Block private networks and Block bogon networks are unchecked.

  6. Save the changes.

How it works...

You've just defined your first internal network. If you've been performing the recipes in order, you've now met the minimum requirements for a fully-functioning firewall! You've defined one external network (WAN) and one internal network (LAN). You can now define the rules and relationships to regulate traffic between the two.

There's more...

You can now connect a switch to the LAN interface on your pfSense machine. This will allow you to connect multiple computers to your LAN network.

See also

  • The Identifying and assigning interfaces recipe

  • The Configuring the WAN interfaces recipe

  • The Configuring optional interfaces recipe