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)

Using Snort for traffic shaping

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Layer 7 (deep packet inspection) traffic shaping has been removed from pfSense's built-in traffic shaper, and it is now recommended that you use a third-party solution such as Snort for such purposes. Configuring Snort can be somewhat involved, but if your traffic shaping requirements include some form of deep packet inspection, Snort can do the job quite well.

Installing and configuring Snort

The initial installation of Snort is simple. Navigate to System | Package Manager and click on the Available Packages tab. Scroll down to the entry for Snort and click on the green Install button. Then click on the Confirm button to confirm installation. Once...