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)

Introduction


One of the main selling points of incorporating pfSense into our networks is that it facilitates reliability. This is often expressed in terms of two components: redundancy and high availability. Redundancy is defined as the duplication of critical components. This can mean either passive or active redundancy—with passive redundancy, we incorporate excess capacity into a network, so that when a component fails, resources are still available. Active redundancy involves monitoring components and performing an automatic reconfiguration if a component fails. High availability means ensuring a specified level of operational performance over a period of time, for example, 99.9% uptime.

pfSense incorporates redundancy and high availability via multi-WAN setups, server load balancing, and Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP). Multi-WAN configurations allow you to have more than one outbound interface, either to aggregate multiple internet connections, or to guarantee that if one...