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

Creating a virtual LAN


This recipe describes how to create a virtual LAN in pfSense.

Getting ready

A VLAN allows a single physical switch to host multiple Layer-2 networks by separating ports with VLAN tags. A VLAN tag defines a separate virtual network. The pfSense firewall can attach to each VLAN by defining VLAN tags on the firewall interfaces.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to Interfaces | (assign).

  2. Click the VLANs tab.

  3. Click the "plus" button to add a new virtual LAN.

  4. Select a Parent Interface. Refer to the interface assignment page as a reference (shown in the following screenshot). In this case, DMZ is assigned to interface vr2 and we'll select that.

  5. Specify a VLAN tag, any integer from 1 to 4094.

  6. Add a Description, such as My DMZ virtual LAN.

  7. Save the changes.

How it works...

Every packet destined for, or originating from our VLAN will be marked with the VLAN tag. This is how pfSense differentiates them from other network traffic and ensures they end up in the right place.

See also

  • The Identifying and...