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

NAT concepts

Before we start to talk about NAT concepts, let's understand what kind of problems it solves. Let's think of a small company with a network of 10 devices and all of them need to be connected directly to the internet. We are talking about a small company with a limited budget, so the available WAN connection has only one public Internet Protocol (IP) address and there is no possibility to get an upgrade to a service that provides an entire IP network range. Sound familiar? In Brazil and Portugal, this scenario is very common. So, how do we connect all those devices using a single public IP address? If you answered using NAT, you're right! This is one of the most common scenarios for using NAT. Another one is when you need to provide, let's say, web services, but you have more web servers than available public IP addresses. In this case, NAT can help too, by using different ports of the same IP address. But what is the difference between these two examples...