Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

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 multi-WAN load balancing


This recipe describes how to configure multi-WAN load balancing on a single pfSense system.

Getting ready

Throughout this recipe, we will configure load-balancing for two separate WAN interfaces. Make sure that the WAN interfaces are first properly configured; refer to the previous recipe for the specifics.

Note

Every time multi-WAN load balancing is in effect, failover is as well. If we wanted to enable multi-WAN failover only, we would refer to the next recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to System | Routing.

  2. Select the Groups tab.

  3. Enter a Group Name.

  4. Set the Gateway Priority of both our WAN gateways to Tier 1.

  5. Leave the Trigger Level set to Member Down.

  6. Add a Description:

  7. Save the changes.

  8. Apply changes, if necessary:

  9. Browse to System | Routing.

  10. Edit our WAN gateway.

  11. Specify an external IP address that responds to pings in the Monitor IP field. I have chosen the IP for http://www.google.com/ in this example, but you may prefer to choose an address closer to your firewall...