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)

Other packages

There are also a number of other packages that, while not likely to be utilized by most pfSense users, are nonetheless useful and deserve mention. For the most part, these packages are more likely to be useful in corporate-type deployments, so if you are installing pfSense in such an environment and the stock pfSense installation does not provide the functionality you require, you may want to review this section to see if any of the packages discussed meet your needs.

Snort

Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention system and intrusion detection system. Among its features, it can do real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. It can be run in three different modes:

  • Packet sniffing mode: In this...