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

Accessing the Secure Shell (SSH)


This recipe describes how to access the pfSense console from any Linux, Mac, or Windows client computer.

Getting ready

SSH must be enabled and configured on our pfSense box. Linux and Mac users will have the SSH client installed by default. Windows users will have to download and install PuTTY.

How to do it...

Connect via SSH from a Linux/Mac client as follows:

  1. Open a terminal window and run:

  2. If you are using the default configuration, you'll then be prompted for a password.

  3. If you are using RSA key authentication, you'll connect directly or be asked to enter the pass-phrase associated with your key. If you need to specify the location of your private key file, you can use the -i option as follows:

    ssh -i /home/matt/key/id_rsa [email protected]
    
  4. If you've configured pfSense to use a different port, you can specify that using the -p option, as in the following example:

    ssh -p 12345 [email protected]
    

    Connect via SSH from a Windows client with PuTTY as follows:

  5. Open PuTTY and specify your hostname or IP address.

  6. Specify an alternative port if necessary (default is port 22).

  7. If you are using RSA key authentication, browse to your private key file from Connection | SSH | Auth | Private key file for authentication.

  8. You'll connect and be prompted for a username.

  9. You'll then be prompted for a password, or if RSA authentication is used, you'll connect directly or be prompted for your pass-phrase.

How it works...

SSH allows access to the pfSense console menu from any computer that has an SSH client. You can even access the console from your phone if you install an SSH client on your mobile device.

See also

  • The Enabling the Secure Shell (SSH) recipe

  • The Generating authorized RSA keys recipe

  • The Configuring SSH RSA key authentication recipe