pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall which provides a platform for flexible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options which, compared to other offerings, makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important. Through this book, you will see that pfSense offers numerous other alternatives to fit any environment's security needs.
This book follows a cookbook style to teach you how to use the features available with pfSense after determining your environment's security requirements. It covers everything from initial configuration of your network interfaces and pfSense services such as DHCP and Dynamic DNS to complex techniques to enable failover and load-balancing.
Chapter 1, Initial Configuration covers the settings needed for almost every pfSense deployment including those for a firewall, router, and wireless access point. Through the recipes in this chapter, you will learn how to install and configure pfSense with a fully-operational firewall and router.
Chapter 2, Essential Services explains how to configure the essential networking services provided by pfSense such as the DHCP server and dynamic DNS services.
Chapter 3, General Configuration describes how to configure NAT and firewall rules and the features associated with them.
Chapter 4, Virtual Private Networking describes how to configure pfSense to serve any or all of the four major VPN implementations—IPSec, L2TP, OpenVPN, and PPTP.
Chapter 5, Advanced Configuration covers advanced networking features such as configuring different types of virtual IP, creating gateways, and bridging interfaces.
Chapter 6, Redundancy, Load Balancing, and Failover contains recipes explaining how to load-balance or failover the multi-WAN interfaces to protect large and sensitive systems.
Chapter 7, Services and Maintenance describes all the networking services and features offered in pfSense such as configuring external logging (syslog server), enabling Wake On LAN (WOL), and configuring automatic configuration file backup.
Appendix A, Monitoring and Logging includes the features available in pfSense to help you monitor your system and also covers how to use different logging tools built into pfSense.
Appendix B, Determining our Hardware Requirements will show you how to choose the best pfSense configuration after you determine your firewall requirements. You will even learn how and where to deploy pfSense to fit your environment's security needs.
A working installation of pfSense 2.0 is the only requirement for the recipes in this book. Readers who are new to pfSense can follow the recipes in the appendices for instructions on how to determine what type of hardware they should install pfSense on. The minimum requirements for a pfSense installation are 500Mhz, 128MB RAM, and 1GB hard disk space. PfSense can also be installed as a virtual machine, and for convenience a VMWare image is available from the Downloads section of the pfSense website.
This book is intended for all levels of network administrators. If you are an advanced user of pfSense, then you can flip to a particular recipe and quickly accomplish the task at hand, while if you are new to pfSense, you can read chapter-by-chapter and learn all of the features of the system from the ground-up.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Our public key is now located at /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
ssh -i /home/matt/key/id_rsa [email protected]New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On the Virtual IPs tab, click the "plus" button to add a new virtual IP Address".
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