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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered several useful services that are available with pfSense. SSH login, DHCP, DDNS, and DNS are four services that you will probably want to implement at some point, even if you are using pfSense in a home or SOHO environment. The remaining services—captive portal, NTP, and SNMP—are services you might not be likely to implement unless you are using pfSense in a corporate environment. Nonetheless, it's a good idea to have a working knowledge of these services.

In the upcoming chapters, you will learn how to further unleash the power of pfSense, with an eye towards making our networks more robust and scalable. One of the ways we can make our networks more scalable is by implementing VLANs, and we will examine that in the next chapter.