Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : David Zientara
Book Image

pfSense 2.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: David Zientara

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of the FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for ?exible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options, which makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important compared to other offerings. pfSense 2.x Cookbook – Second Edition starts by providing you with an understanding of how to complete the basic steps needed to render a pfSense firewall operational. It starts by showing you how to set up different forms of NAT entries and firewall rules and use aliases and scheduling in firewall rules. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a captive portal set up in different ways (no authentication, user manager authentication, and RADIUS authentication), as well as NTP and SNMP configuration. You will then learn how to set up a VPN tunnel with pfSense. The book then focuses on setting up traffic shaping with pfSense, using either the built-in traffic shaping wizard, custom ?oating rules, or Snort. Toward the end, you will set up multiple WAN interfaces, load balancing and failover groups, and a CARP failover group. You will also learn how to bridge interfaces, add static routing entries, and use dynamic routing protocols via third-party packages.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Connecting to the OpenVPN service


In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to set up an OpenVPN client connection.

In circumstances in which we need to support one or more clients in the field connecting to our network through a VPN tunnel, we will find it necessary to set up an OpenVPN client connection. Fortunately, pfSense makes the process easy—the OpenVPN Client Export Utility package greatly simplifies the process of setting up a client connection from both the server and client side, as we shall see.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, you will first need a valid CA and a valid server certificate, which you will have done already if you followed the previous recipe, Configuring the OpenVPN service. If you have not created a CA and server certificate, you will create them in as the first two steps in this recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Make sure you have a valid CA. If not, create one by following step 1 in the Connecting to the OpenVPN service recipe.
  2. Make sure you have a valid server...