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

Restoring pfSense


Often, we need to restore pfSense, either to recover from a hardware or software failure or to roll back pfSense to a previous point. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to restore pfSense.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to Diagnostics | Backup & Restore.
  2. Click on the Backup & Restore tab.
  3. In the Restore Backup section, select the subset of data to restore in the Restore area drop-down menu (or leave it set to All):

 

 

  1. Next to Configuration file, click on the Browse button and use the dialog box to navigate to an XML backup file that you previously saved.
  2. If the backup file is encrypted, check the Encryption checkbox and enter the password in the Password text field.
  3. Click on the Restore Configuration button. A dialog box will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to restore the configuration. The firewall will reboot after restoration is complete.
  4. If there are packages to restore, click on the Reinstall Packages button.

How it works...

In this recipe, we used the backup XML file generated in the previous recipe, and used it to restore pfSense.

There's more...

There is another way of restoring pfSense, without even having to save an XML file. From the console/SSH, menu item 15 is Restore recent configuration. The options for the command are as follows:

  • List backups: Lists the last 30 backups, with backup #30 being the most recent
  • Restore backup: Restores one of these 30 backups
  • Quit: Returns to the main menu

This can be useful if you need a quick and dirty way to roll back a system. If you need to restore a system to factory defaults, you can select menu item 4.