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 a web server load balancer


This recipe describes how to configure a small webfarm using the pfSense load balancer.

Getting ready

The load balancer allows pfSense to distribute certain types of traffic to multiple machines. A common use of this feature is to distribute incoming HTTP requests to multiple webservers and the following recipe describes how the load balancer can create a webfarm to accomplish this.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to Services | Load Balancer.

  2. Click the Monitor tab.

  3. Click the "plus" button to add a new monitor.

  4. Specify a Name.

  5. Add a Description.

  6. Set Type to HTTP.

  7. Set Host to an unused IP address that you will later use as the IP address for the virtual server. The virtual server will be configured to pass requests to the actual servers in the webfarm; so we will monitor this IP address.

  8. Leave HTTP Code set to 200 OK:

  9. Save the changes.

  10. Apply changes, if necessary:

  11. Click the Pools tab.

  12. Click the "plus" button to add a new pool.

  13. Specify a Name.

  14. Set the Mode to Load Balance.

  15. Add a...