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)

Troubleshooting scenarios

Having covered troubleshooting techniques and tools, we now have a chance to put them into use by considering a real-world example. Keep in mind that some problems have multiple potential causes, and you may have to gather some information before making a conjecture as to the root cause.

VLAN configuration problem

First, let's consider an issue that I encountered when configuring a switch discussed in Chapter 3, VLANs. I installed a TP-Link TL-SG108E switch on my network, and had planned to set up two VLANs using this switch. I had given some consideration as to how the VLANs would be configured, and I settled on the following:

  • Each VLAN would be assigned three ports (the TL-SG108E is an eight...