Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for flexible 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. Through this book you will see that pfSense offers numerous alternatives to fit any environment's security needs. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook is the first and only book to explore all the features of pfSense, including those released in the latest 2.0 version. With the help of step-by-step instructions and detailed screenshots of the pfSense interface you will be able to configure every general and advanced feature from creating a firewall rule to configuring multi-WAN failover. Each recipe includes tips and offers advice on variations of the topic or references to other related recipes and additional information that can be found from other sources. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook covers the gamut of available features and functionality. The first three chapters will take you from a non-existent system to a basic pfSense firewall. The next chapter focuses on configuring any number of the VPN services available, a very important and sought-after feature for anyone implementing a firewall. The following two chapters describe how to configure the most advanced features available in pfSense; features that may only be relevant to the most experienced network admins. Chapter 7 is dedicated to understanding and configuring the "grab-bag" of features that are available in pfSense, but are often stand-alone options and unrelated to each other. The first appendix explains how to use the status monitoring tools available for many of the features. The second appendix wraps up with helping you to decide how and where pfSense may be incorporated into your system and what type of hardware is required based on your throughput needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
pfSense 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring an external syslog server


This recipe describes how to configure pfSense to use an external logging server.

Getting ready

To configure pfSense to use a separate server for logging, we obviously need a separate logging server to accomplish this. The following sections describe how to create a syslog server on each of the major operating systems.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to Status | System Logs.

  2. Click the Settings tab.

  3. Check Enable syslog'ing to remote syslog server.

  4. Enter the IP address(es) of our external syslog servers.

  5. Check the types of events to be logged.

  6. Save the changes.

  7. Apply changes, if necessary.

How it works...

Once configured, pfSense will send event logs to an external server instead of logging them locally. This is a great way to free up resources on a pfSense machine and to save larger and more detailed logs to a machine with much more disk space.

Running a syslog service in Linux/Mac OS

Almost all Linux and Mac OS distributions already include the syslogd service. Visit the following page for more information: http://linux.die.net/man/8/syslogd.

Running a syslog service in Windows

Download and install the Kiwi Syslog Server for Windows from http://www.kiwisyslog.com.

See also