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)

CARP configuration

Whereas pfSense's load balancing capabilities may leave something to be desired, pfSense's high availability capabilities are quite good, and pfSense offers an enterprise class CARP solution that provides for stateful failover. We will first consider a basic CARP group for firewall failover, but we will also consider other scenarios involving CARP, such as multi-WAN deployments.

Version 2.4.3 added support for Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) on CARP virtual IPs. The PPPoE connection will only be active on the master node.

Example 1 – CARP with two firewalls

This is probably the most common deployment scenario in which CARP is involved. There are two common deployment scenarios...