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

Introduction


Routing and bridging are often employed for similar reasons, but there are significant differences between the two. Routing refers to the process of moving packets between two or more networks, while bridging refers to connecting two or more network segments together. Thus, routing involves inter-network traffic, while bridging can involve intra-network traffic.

Routing

Most routing in pfSense is handled transparently, and, as a result, we tend to take it for granted. A pfSense router will know where to send traffic between two networks if both networks are connected to pfSense. If it doesn't know where to send a packet, pfSense will send it, by default, to the gateway, which in most cases is the WAN interface. Thus, if we request Google's home page, pfSense's routing daemon will realize that Google's IP address is not on any of the local networks and send the request through the default gateway.

 

 

There are cases, however, where the destination network is a local network not directly...