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

Using tcpflow


Like tcpdump, tcpflow gives you the ability to view the text contents of network packets in real time. Tcpdump, however, is more suited to capturing packets and protocol information. Tcpflow is more suited toward viewing the actual data flow between two hosts. While tcpdump displays output to the console by default, tcpflow writes output to a file by default, and you must use the -c option if you want to see the tcpflow output on the console.

This recipe describes how to use tcpflow in pfSense.

How to do it...

  1. Tcpflow is not part of the default pfSense installation. Perhaps the easiest way to install tcpflow is to use the Linux/Unix repositories athttps://pkgs.org: the 64-bit binaries for tcpflow v. 1.5.0 can be found athttps://freebsd.pkgs.org/12/freebsd-ports-latest-amd64/tcpflow-1.5.0.txz.html. Install these into a suitable location on your pfSense system, such as/usr/sbin/tcpflow. Make sure the binaries are executable; you can do this with the following command:
 chmod 755...