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 began with some basic VPN concepts, with our focus being primarily on the three VPN protocols currently supported by pfSense: IPsec, L2TP, and OpenVPN. We weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each protocol with respect to security, cross-platform support, ease of configuration, and firewall-friendliness. We emphasized that since L2TP lacks confidentiality and encryption, you are not likely to ever implement L2TP in native mode; rather, it is more likely to be implemented in combination with IPsec, making your choice one between IPsec, L2TP/IPsec, and OpenVPN.

We then covered IPsec, L2TP, and OpenVPN configuration in some depth. We covered the OpenVPN Client Export Utility, which makes the process of generating OpenVPN configuration files for different platforms much easier. Finally, in the troubleshooting section, we covered what to do when...