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)

Failover across multiple WAN connections

Now, pfSense has been configured for load balancing and implicit failover. Let's proceed and verify this configuration further.

Let's take the verification one step further. Instead of disabling a WAN connection, let's try to disable each of the gateways and observe the effects:

  1. Click System tab on the toolbar and select Routing. Click the Gateway Groups tab:

Both have the Priority set to Tier 1, which indicates that pfSense is currently working as a load balancer, which inherently also provides failover.

  1. Click the Gateways tab and let's disable the first link, which is WAN1-DHCP:
  1. Click the Edit icon to its left. Scroll down to the field Force State. Select the Mark Gateway as Down checkbox:

  1. Click Save. Click Apply Changes. Go back to the client machine and see if it is getting a response. You will see that...