Book Image

Network Security with pfSense

By : Manuj Aggarwal
Book Image

Network Security with pfSense

By: Manuj Aggarwal

Overview of this book

While connected to the internet, you’re a potential target for an array of cyber threats, such as hackers, keyloggers, and Trojans that attack through unpatched security holes. A firewall works as a barrier (or ‘shield’) between your computer and cyberspace. pfSense is highly versatile firewall software. With thousands of enterprises using pfSense, it is fast becoming the world's most trusted open source network security solution. Network Security with pfSense begins with an introduction to pfSense, where you will gain an understanding of what pfSense is, its key features, and advantages. Next, you will learn how to configure pfSense as a firewall and create and manage firewall rules. As you make your way through the chapters, you will test pfSense for failover and load balancing across multiple wide area network (WAN) connections. You will then configure pfSense with OpenVPN for secure remote connectivity and implement IPsec VPN tunnels with pfSense. In the concluding chapters, you’ll understand how to configure and integrate pfSense as a Squid proxy server. By the end of this book, you will be able to leverage the power of pfSense to build a secure network.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Managing firewall rules

You have configured firewall rules for LAN1 and LAN2. Now, let's see how you can manage these rules. Now that you have created many rules for the firewall, you need to understand how to manage all of these rules efficiently and effectively.

If you want to add a new rule that is very similar to an existing rule, you can copy the existing rule.

  1. Click the LAN2 tab and try to create some new rules by copying existing rules. Here, we have only created ICMP and DNS rules. Let's create some more standard rules.
  2. Click the copy icon under Actions for the DNS (53) rule. You can now make modifications to the rule as required. All the fields are copied from the original rule. For this instance, let's change the Source port range to HTTP(80) and leave the other fields as they are.
  3. Click the Save button. And this is the quickest way to create new rules...