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 basic VLAN concepts while also considering two examples in which it would be advantageous to implement VLANs. We then covered the configuration of that example network, both in pfSense and in the switch itself. Finally, we covered VLAN troubleshooting, and walked through a hypothetical VLAN problem and how to solve it.

In the next chapter, we will cover pfSense as a firewall, which is one of the core functions of pfSense. The chapter will cover rule creation, NAT, scheduling, aliases, and virtual IPs. Traffic shaping, which is also part of pfSense's firewall functionality, gets its own chapter, and will be covered in Chapter 5, Using pfSense as a Firewall.