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)

Summary

In this chapter, we took a look at some of the more significant packages available for pfSense. More packages have been added over the past few years, and as a result, if the stock pfSense installation doesn't provide what you need, there's a good chance that a third-party package exists that does. Packages implementing proxy servers, network monitoring, and network intrusion detection/prevention are among the most popular ones, but in addition to that, there are packages for load balancing and routing, among others. This chapter covered what the author believes to be the most important packages, but be sure to look through the complete package list before giving up the search for the package you require.

In the final chapter, we will cover a topic that is essential to creating and maintaining a computer network but is often overlooked: troubleshooting.

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