Book Image

OPNsense Beginner to Professional

By : Julio Cesar Bueno de Camargo
5 (1)
Book Image

OPNsense Beginner to Professional

5 (1)
By: Julio Cesar Bueno de Camargo

Overview of this book

OPNsense is one of the most powerful open source firewalls and routing platforms available. With OPNsense, you can now protect networks using features that were only previously available to closed source commercial firewalls. This book is a practical guide to building a comprehensive network defense strategy using OPNsense. You’ll start with the basics, understanding how to install, configure, and protect network resources using native features and additional OPNsense plugins. Next, you’ll explore real-world examples to gain in-depth knowledge of firewalls and network defense. You’ll then focus on boosting your network defense, preventing cyber threats, and improving your knowledge of firewalling using this open source security platform. By the end of this OPNsense book, you’ll be able to install, configure, and manage the OPNsense firewall by making the most of its features.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Initial Configuration
6
Section 2: Securing the Network
13
Section 3: Going beyond the Firewall

Choosing a Zenarmor edition

The plugin has a free edition that is pretty functional and works great in most small network environments. Compared to the paid versions, it has some limitations, but most are features that are only required by complex networks that deserve a paid version subscription.

Before comparing the different available versions, let’s check the hardware requirements.

Hardware requirements

As IPS does, Zenarmor also uses the Netmap framework to inspect and filter network packets, so don’t enable it in the same configured network interfaces, as you would in IPS mode by going to Services | Intrusion Detection | Administration – Interfaces.

Reports are something else that Zenarmor has that demands more memory and CPU than a stock OPNsense installation. It is based on Elasticsearch, which requires significant memory and CPU power to process data and transform it into meaningful graphs. The plugin installation does a hardware requirements...