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

Remote desktop access, a complete example


The recipe describes how to access an internal machine using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Getting ready

The purpose of this recipe is to demonstrate a typical firewall task from start to finish. The following example will demonstrate how to remote into an internal machine from anywhere on the Internet. Doing so requires the configuration of the following features, which have all been covered in recipes preceding this point in the book:

  • DHCP Server

  • DHCP static mappings

  • DNS Forwarder

  • Aliases

  • NAT port forwarding

  • Firewall rules

  • Schedules

How to do it...

  1. Let's connect a computer to our network.

  2. Browse to Status | DHCP Leases to find the newly added computer. Click the "plus" button to assign a new static mapping for the device:

  3. Let's assign it a static IP address of 192.168.1.200 and call it laptop1:

  4. Let's make sure our DNS Forwarder is configured to automatically serve static mappings at Services | DNS Forwarder, so that we can easily reference our laptop...