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)

Port forwarding

Port forwarding is probably the most commonly used form of NAT. It is commonly used when we have a single public IP address and several resources that must be made accessible to the internet. As a result, instead of assigning a single public IP address to every resource, instead we use one public IP address and assign a separate port to each resource.

Port forwarding is rarely used in corporate networks; in fact, higher-end routers do not have easily configurable ways of setting up port forwarding. Fortunately, however, pfSense is designed to be used on a variety of different networks. Port forwarding is usually a feature found on consumer grade routers, and the inclusion of port forwarding in pfSense is an acknowledgement that pfSense will often be deployed in home and SOHO networks.

Before we get started with port forwarding, we should mention the following:

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