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)

Example – multi-WAN and CARP

In the previous chapter, we covered an example network in which we implemented both load balancing (for an FTP server) and a CARP failover group. In this section, we will add multi-WAN capabilities to this network. We don't want our second connection to go unused even when the first connection is up, so we want to make it part of a load balancing group. However, our second connection is a DSL connection with 1.544 Mbps up and 1.544 Mbps down, whereas our primary connection is a standard broadband connection. We will want to take this into account when setting up our gateway group and make sure the primary connection handles the lion's share of internet-bound traffic. Adding multi-WAN capabilities to a CARP setup is not particularly difficult, but it does involved several steps:

  1. Add and configure the OPT_WAN interfaces.
  2. Configure DNS...