Book Image

Network Security with pfSense

By : Manuj Aggarwal
Book Image

Network Security with pfSense

By: Manuj Aggarwal

Overview of this book

While connected to the internet, you’re a potential target for an array of cyber threats, such as hackers, keyloggers, and Trojans that attack through unpatched security holes. A firewall works as a barrier (or ‘shield’) between your computer and cyberspace. pfSense is highly versatile firewall software. With thousands of enterprises using pfSense, it is fast becoming the world's most trusted open source network security solution. Network Security with pfSense begins with an introduction to pfSense, where you will gain an understanding of what pfSense is, its key features, and advantages. Next, you will learn how to configure pfSense as a firewall and create and manage firewall rules. As you make your way through the chapters, you will test pfSense for failover and load balancing across multiple wide area network (WAN) connections. You will then configure pfSense with OpenVPN for secure remote connectivity and implement IPsec VPN tunnels with pfSense. In the concluding chapters, you’ll understand how to configure and integrate pfSense as a Squid proxy server. By the end of this book, you will be able to leverage the power of pfSense to build a secure network.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Load balancing and failover across multiple WAN connections

Now, let's go ahead and configure pfSense to act as a load balancer across multiple WAN connections:

  1. Let's switch to the pfSense server. Here we are at the command-line dashboard for pfSense:

You can see here that we have configured two WAN connections. The first WAN interface is em0 and the WAN2 interface is em2. Both of them have different IPs. The LAN1 interface is em1. Basically, the third network interface was renamed from LAN2 to WAN2, and instead of connecting it to an internal switch, the third network interface was connected to a new ISP.

  1. Let's use the Windows 2012 R2 machine to access the WebGUI console.
Additionally, you can also use the Windows 7 client system to test the connectivity.
  1. Let's move on to the configuration process for load balancing and also for failover.
  2. Open the...