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

Updating pfSense firmware


This recipe describes how to update the pfSense firmware.

Getting ready

Let's be sure to make a backup of our current configuration file before we proceed with a complete system upgrade.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to System | Firmware.

  2. Click the Auto Update tab.

  3. Click Invoke Auto Upgrade.

  4. Observe the download status.

  5. Once the download is complete, pfSense will upgrade itself and reboot.

  6. On the first login after the system has rebooted, we'll be redirected to Package Manager status page.

How it works...

pfSense will contact a web service at http://pfsense.org/ to determine the latest firmware version, and to download that firmware if needed.

There's more...

pfSense also allows for a manual firmware upgrade, outlined in the steps below:

  1. Download the appropriate version from http://pfsense.org/ and save it locally.

  2. Browse to System | Firmware.

  3. Click the Manual Update tab.

  4. Click the Enable firmware upload button.

  5. Click Browse to locate the firmware file we've downloaded.

  6. Click Upgrade firmware...