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)

Basic concepts

In networking, load balancing is designed to distribute workloads across multiple network resources. Load balancing in pfSense has two types: gateway load balancing and server load balancing:

  • The purpose of gateway load balancing is to distribute internet-bound traffic over more than one WAN interface. Thus, configuration is separate from server load balancing, and is done by configuring gateway groups by navigating to System | Routing and clicking on the Gateway Groups tab.
  • The purpose of server load balancing is to distribute traffic among multiple internal servers. In some cases, we may also want to have redundant servers available for failover, and this is supported in pfSense as well. Server load balancing also ensures both reliability and high availability because it ensures that only servers that are online respond to client requests. A good load balancer...