Book Image

Mastering pfSense - Second Edition

By : David Zientara
Book Image

Mastering pfSense - Second Edition

By: David Zientara

Overview of this book

pfSense has the same reliability and stability as even the most popular commercial firewall offerings on the market – but, like the very best open-source software, it doesn’t limit you. You’re in control – you can exploit and customize pfSense around your security needs. Mastering pfSense - Second Edition, covers features that have long been part of pfSense such as captive portal, VLANs, traffic shaping, VPNs, load balancing, Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP), multi-WAN, and routing. It also covers features that have been added with the release of 2.4, such as support for ZFS partitions and OpenVPN 2.4. This book takes into account the fact that, in order to support increased cryptographic loads, pfSense version 2.5 will require a CPU that supports AES-NI. The second edition of this book places more of an emphasis on the practical side of utilizing pfSense than the previous edition, and, as a result, more examples are provided which show in step-by-step fashion how to implement many features.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Routing

For the most part, pfSense does routing transparently. If a node on the local network is attempting to send a packet to a node on a local network, pfSense will send it to the right network, assuming that the network is directly attached to pfSense. If a node on the local network is attempting to send a packet to a remote network, pfSense will send it to a gateway. There are some special cases, however, and we will discuss them in this section.

Static routes

When we have local networks that are reachable through a router other than pfSense's default gateway, we need to configure a static route. A simple example of this situation is a router that is connected to the LAN network. The following diagram illustrates...