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 external logging with a syslog server


Syslog is a standardized system for logging all types of information. Syslog client and server implementations exist for all major operating systems.

If you primarily use Linux to run servers, then setting up syslog should be easy. Most Linux distributions already run the syslog service, so setting up a centralized server is only a matter of deciding which machine to use, configuring that machine to listen for syslog data on the network, and then configuring all other machines to direct syslog messages to that server.

This recipe describes how to configure pfSense to write logs to an external syslog server.

Getting ready

To turn a Windows machine into a centralized syslog server, take a look at the Kiwi Syslog Server and Log Viewer.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to Status | System Logs.
  2. Click on the Settings tab.
  1. Check the Enable Remote Logging checkbox:
  1. In the Remote Log Servers text fields, specify the IP addresses of up to three remote syslog servers...