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

Introduction


If you are running pfSense in an enterprise-level environment, and even if you aren’t, backing up your pfSense system on a regular basis is a sound decision, for a variety of reasons:

  • A catastrophic hardware failure could bring your pfSense system down. While we can try to minimize the effect of such failures by using such redundancy methods such as CARP, by backing up our system we can reduce the amount of time needed to restore our firewall setup.
  • We are constantly making changes to our configuration, and occasionally, these changes have unintended consequences. Often, the easiest way of resolving such a problem is to roll back our configuration to a previous version, which we can do easily if we previously backed up pfSense.

Backing up and restoring pfSense are two sides of the same coin, but updating pfSense is also an integral part of maintaining a robust system. Updates often incorporate bug fixes, security patches, and new features. Since we will want to take advantage of all of these, we will want to keep our pfSense systems relatively up-to-date. We will not always have the luxury of being able to update pfSense right away—such activities may have to be reserved for scheduled maintenance windows—but neither will we want to allow our systems to get out-of-date.