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 (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Configuring the OpenVPN service


This recipe demonstrates how to set up an OpenVPN connection from the server side.

As with IPsec, OpenVPN can be used in both site-to-site mode (creating an OpenVPN tunnel between two firewalls) and client-server mode (one side accepts a connection from the other side). The implementation of OpenVPN in pfSense allows us to set up peer-to-peer and client-server connections, but in a slightly different way than IPsec. With IPsec, if we wanted to connect two firewalls, we had to use peer-to-peer mode. With OpenVPN, to connect two firewalls we must connect them in client-server mode. Thus, the client can be either (a) another firewall, or (b) a mobile client who needs to connect to our network (and we can have multiple clients connecting to the same server).

In this recipe, we will describe how to set up pfSense to act as an OpenVPN server. This requires seven separate steps:

  1. Creating the CA and certificates
  2. Configuring the OpenVPN server
  3. Creating firewall rules to...