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

This chapter begins by covering services that are useful, and in some cases necessary, and moves on very quickly to utilities used primarily for diagnostics and troubleshooting.

If you are involved with configuring and maintaining computer networks, it is a virtual certainty that, at some point, a network will not function as intended. Fortunately, pfSense provides us with a number of services and applications to help us troubleshoot networking issues. This chapter focuses on those services and applications.

A structured approach to problem solving

As our networks become more complex, it becomes more difficult to find the cause or causes of a problem, and even more difficult to implement solutions while minimizing...