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 traffic shaping

There's no doubt that troubleshooting traffic shaping issues can be challenging. Even if we set up the queues and rules the way we think they should be set up, it may not work the way we think it should, and in many cases, we might not get it to work right the first time. Often we must fall back on the tried and true troubleshooting steps: diagnosing the problem, forming a hypothesis, testing it, implementing a solution, verifying that the system works, and documenting the solution. But there are some common issues that we should also cover.

We may have problems keeping P2P traffic in the P2P queue. The main reason for this is that for the most part, pfSense relies on ports as matching criteria for the traffic shaping rules. Many P2P applications, including BitTorrent, rely on non-standard or random ports. There are several possible solutions...