The purpose of this book is to explain the basics of pfSense—installing, configuring, and utilizing its services—to the networking beginner. This book does not presuppose any prior knowledge of networking, and thus some of the material is devoted to explaining networking basics. At the same time, this book focuses on pfSense fundamentals—not networking fundamentals—and if you find such explanations inadequate, it might behoove you to find a good networking primer to supplement your reading. For example, any of the popular review guides for the CompTIA's Networking+ exam should prove adequate.
The following are the main topics covered in this book:
- Installing and configuring pfSense
- Captive portal configuration
- Configuration of other basic services (DNS, NTP, SNMP, and so on)
- Firewall and NAT
- Traffic shaping
- VPNs
- Multiple WANs
- Routing and bridging
- Diagnostics and troubleshooting
This book is not aimed at intermediate users—it is aimed mainly at beginners setting up a home for their SOHO network. Therefore, some topics that would be more appropriate in a corporate network scenario have been omitted, such as load balancing and failovers. Other topics that might be worthy of a more extensive treatment in a more intermediate-level book, such as VLANs, have been scaled back somewhat. Also, although third-party packages are mentioned where appropriate, this book does not discuss such packages in any great depth.
Nonetheless, the reader should come away from this book with a basic understanding of how to utilize pfSense in the most common scenarios. If you feel you need to know more about pfSense than the information contained within this book, you might consider another book I authored, Mastering pfSense, which covers intermediate-level topics.