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)

Virtual IPs

Virtual IPs (VIPs) refer to a situation where an IP address does not correspond to a single physical interface. They are used in many scenarios, including the following:

  • NAT (including one-to-many NAT)
  • Scenarios where fault tolerance is needed (for example CARP)
  • Mobile usage scenarios, which allows a mobile user to maintain a consistent virtual IP address even as their actual IP address changes

To add a VIP, navigate to Firewall | Virtual IPs and click on the Add button at the bottom of the table. pfSense offers four options for virtual IPs:

  • IP Alias
  • CARP
  • Proxy ARP
  • Other

Of these four options, we can state the following:

  • CARP, Proxy ARP, and Other were available with the earliest versions of pfSense. IP Alias is available with version 2.0 and higher.
  • All current options can be used with NAT.
  • CARP and IP Alias can be used by the firewall to bind and/or run services...