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

Configuring a CARP failover group


In this recipe, we will configure a CARP failover group with two firewalls; one firewall will be online, and the other will be offline, ready to take over as soon as the primary firewall fails.

Getting ready

Implementing a CARP failover group requires an additional investment in hardware. Namely, you must have access to the following hardware to complete this recipe, in addition to your primary firewall:

  • A secondary firewall that is an exact copy of the first.
  • A router for the WAN side of the network, one that will provide a way of connecting both the primary and secondary firewall to the ISP.
  • A crossover cable, to provide a way of connecting the pfsync interfaces on the primary and secondary firewalls.

How to do it...

The following recipe is the most involved recipe in this book; nonetheless, if you follow these steps painstakingly, setting up a CARP failover group should prove to be fairly easy.

The following diagram illustrates the new network topology. The f...