Book Image

Mastering pfSense - Second Edition

By : David Zientara
Book Image

Mastering pfSense - Second Edition

By: David Zientara

Overview of this book

pfSense has the same reliability and stability as even the most popular commercial firewall offerings on the market – but, like the very best open-source software, it doesn’t limit you. You’re in control – you can exploit and customize pfSense around your security needs. Mastering pfSense - Second Edition, covers features that have long been part of pfSense such as captive portal, VLANs, traffic shaping, VPNs, load balancing, Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP), multi-WAN, and routing. It also covers features that have been added with the release of 2.4, such as support for ZFS partitions and OpenVPN 2.4. This book takes into account the fact that, in order to support increased cryptographic loads, pfSense version 2.5 will require a CPU that supports AES-NI. The second edition of this book places more of an emphasis on the practical side of utilizing pfSense than the previous edition, and, as a result, more examples are provided which show in step-by-step fashion how to implement many features.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Outbound NAT

Outbound NAT configuration, as the name applies, covers traffic from our internal networks whose destination is an external network. The default NAT configuration in pfSense automatically translates outbound traffic to the WAN IP address. If there are multiple WAN interfaces, traffic leaving any WAN interface is automatically translated to the address of the WAN interface which is being used. If you navigate to Firewall | NAT and click on the Outbound NAT tab without having previously configured Outbound NAT, you will find that the default setting is Automatic outbound NAT rule generation.

The following screenshot demonstrates the default behavior of outbound NAT in pfSense on a relatively simple network with three interfaces: WAN, LAN (the 172.16.0.0 network), and DMZ (the 172.17.0.0 network). pfSense has generated two automatic rules. The first rule is an automatic...