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)

An example network

It often helps to use concrete examples to help illustrate concepts, so once again we will imagine a hypothetical network in order to understand how we would go about configuring firewall rules for a specific environment. Imagine a network with four subnets: SALES, MARKETING, DEVELOPERS, and a DMZ, and with the following requirements:

All subnets should be allowed to access the internet, subject to the restrictions outlined as follows:

  • SALES should not be able to talk to MARKETING and DEVELOPERS; MARKETING should not be able to talk to SALES and DEVELOPERS; DEVELOPERS should not be able to talk to SALES and MARKETING.
  • SALES, MARKETING and DEVELOPERS should be able to talk to the DMZ, but the DMZ should not be able to talk to any local subnets (other than DMZ).
  • SALES and MARKETING share a printer that is on the MARKETING subnet, so SALES should have access to...