Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : David Zientara
Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: David Zientara

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of the FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for ?exible 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. pfSense 2.x Cookbook – Second Edition starts by providing you with an understanding of how to complete the basic steps needed to render a pfSense firewall operational. It starts by showing you how to set up different forms of NAT entries and firewall rules and use aliases and scheduling in firewall rules. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a captive portal set up in different ways (no authentication, user manager authentication, and RADIUS authentication), as well as NTP and SNMP configuration. You will then learn how to set up a VPN tunnel with pfSense. The book then focuses on setting up traffic shaping with pfSense, using either the built-in traffic shaping wizard, custom ?oating rules, or Snort. Toward the end, you will set up multiple WAN interfaces, load balancing and failover groups, and a CARP failover group. You will also learn how to bridge interfaces, add static routing entries, and use dynamic routing protocols via third-party packages.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Determining our throughput requirements

In this section, we will understand the throughput requirements, and subsequently the processing and memory requirements needed for our environment.

We'll want to prepare for determining our requirements by gathering the following information:

  • Our internet connection speed
  • Our network hardware speed (10/100/1000 Mbps)
  • The connection speeds different users will be expecting

Let's begin by considering the throughput guidelines provided on the official pfSense website:

Firewall throughput

Processing power required

Hardware (PCI-X/PCI-e NICs)

21-50 Mbps

500 MHz CPU

No

51-200 Mbps

1 GHz CPU

Recommended (for 100 Mbps and faster)

201-500 Mbps

2 GHz CPU

Recommended

501+ Mbps

3 GHz CPU

Recommended

The following table defines any additional system requirements that would be necessary if deploying...