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

Choosing a standard or embedded Image


This recipe describes how to make the choice of using the standard or embedded version of pfSense.

Getting ready

Every standard feature of pfSense is supported on both the standard and embedded platforms but certain packages are not. The Squid web-caching package, for example, requires extensive writing to disk and should not be run on a compact flash drive.

How to do it...

  1. Let’s review the package we’ve chosen to install:

    NTop package: It is a traffic analysis tool. It requires a minimum of 512 KB RAM, but has no restrictions on the storage type.

  2. Based on this and the convenience of compact flash cards, we’re going to install the embedded version of pfSense.

How it works...

The standard image is meant to be installed on a hard drive. The embedded version is meant to be installed on a compact flash drive. Compact flash drives only have a limited number of writes during their lifespan and the embedded version of pfSense is designed to limit writes to the disk for this very reason. That being said, each platform has some distinct advantages and disadvantages:

Platform

Pros

Cons

Standard

All packages and features are supported

Large amount of cheap storage space

Entire drive must be overwritten (dual booting is not supported)

Require larger power supply

Embedded

Fast access times

Cards can be easily swapped (backup, upgrades, and so on)

Requires little power

Silent

CF cards have a limited number of writes

Not all packages are supported

There’s more...

The installation disk for the standard version of pfSense is also a Live CD. If you’d just like to try pfSense out without installing it to any machine, you can run it live from the CD. You can even save your configuration to a floppy disk or USB drive. However, not all features are available while running pfSense from the Live CD.