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)

Creating a NAT port forwarding entry

This recipe will describe how to create a NAT port forwarding entry.

The complexity of Network Address Translation (NAT) rules varies greatly. In this recipe, we will only cover port forwarding rules. There are actually three other types of NAT rules available in pfSense:

  • Outbound NAT: As the name implies, this form of NAT applies to outbound traffic and involves replacing local IP addresses and port numbers with the WAN IP and port, so packets can be sent out over the public internet. By default, pfSense is configured to automatically generate outbound NAT rules for local interfaces, but you may have to manually configure outbound NAT rules if you are using a VPN, or in other scenarios in which the automatic rules do not produce the desired result. This form of NAT will be covered in a recipe later in this chapter.
  • 1:1 NAT: This form of...