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)

Redundancy and High Availability

One of the primary selling points of pfSense is that deploying pfSense routers on our network enhances the overall reliability of the network. A single network component, however – for example, a single router or a single web server – still represents a single point of failure. Even in the absence of hardware failure, a single network component may not be adequate in accommodating the level of traffic on our network. For that reason, we need to consider eliminating single points of failure from our network whenever possible. This process is two-pronged, and involves incorporating both redundancy and high availability:

  • Redundancy is defined as the duplication of critical components. Redundancy can be both active and passive. With passive redundancy, we incorporate excess capacity into the network, so that when an individual component...