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)

Troubleshooting firewall rules

At some point, there will be a situation where your firewall rules aren't doing what you think they should be doing, and our firewall troubleshooting skills are put to the test. The first step is to diagnose the problem (for example, nodes on the DEVELOPERS network cannot access the internet). If we can easily identify the interface or interfaces which are affected, then we can focus on that interface's ruleset.

It is probably a good idea to check the Floating Rules tab first, since floating rules take precedence over rules for an individual interface, and if the problem is a misconfigured floating rule, then we can save a lot of time that we otherwise would spend double-checking an interface's ruleset. If you are running a proxy server on your firewall, you may want to check the settings on that, since a proxy server's allow...