Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : David Zientara
Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: David Zientara

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of the FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for ?exible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options, which makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important compared to other offerings. pfSense 2.x Cookbook – Second Edition starts by providing you with an understanding of how to complete the basic steps needed to render a pfSense firewall operational. It starts by showing you how to set up different forms of NAT entries and firewall rules and use aliases and scheduling in firewall rules. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a captive portal set up in different ways (no authentication, user manager authentication, and RADIUS authentication), as well as NTP and SNMP configuration. You will then learn how to set up a VPN tunnel with pfSense. The book then focuses on setting up traffic shaping with pfSense, using either the built-in traffic shaping wizard, custom ?oating rules, or Snort. Toward the end, you will set up multiple WAN interfaces, load balancing and failover groups, and a CARP failover group. You will also learn how to bridge interfaces, add static routing entries, and use dynamic routing protocols via third-party packages.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Configuring server load balancing


In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to set up a server load balancing pool for a group of web servers. It is possible to set up such a load balancing pool with third party plugins, but this recipe will demonstrate how to set up load balancing using pfSense's built-in load balancing capabilities.

The web servers in our configuration have IP addresses of 192.168.2.11, 192.168.2.12, and 192.168.2.13.

Getting ready

To effectively use this recipe, you should have a resource on your network, such as an FTP or a web server that has multiple redundant internal servers, and which you want to use in either a load balancing or failover configuration.

How to do it...

  1. First, we will create aliases for ports 80 and 443:
    1. Navigate to Firewall | Aliases.
    2. Click on the Ports tab.
    3. Click on the Add button.
    4. In the Name text field, enter an appropriate name (for example, WEB_SERVER_PORTS):
    1. In the Description edit box, enter a brief, non-parsed description.
    2. Enter 80 in the Port text...