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 discussed pfSense's multi-WAN capabilities, a continuation of our discussion of redundancy and high availability from the previous chapter. A multi-WAN setup with multiple internet connections enables us to achieve a level of reliability and bandwidth that would not be possible with a single connection. Moreover, pfSense makes it easy for us to switch between link aggregation/load balancing and failover. Setting up a multi-WAN gateway group entails several steps. In addition to creating the gateway groups, we must also configure DNS settings, create firewall rules to direct traffic to the gateway, and, if necessary, create NAT rules. In addition, special use cases may require additional steps; we covered one such use case (a multi-WAN setup with a CARP failover group).

In the next chapter, we will cover two basic concepts that you might not encounter...