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)

Further reading

  • The official pfSense documentation wiki is a good place to get started. There you will find a guide for downloading and installing pfSense, a features list, a packages list and documentation for packages, as well as an FAQ document. You can find the wiki at: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Main_Page.
  • During the WAN and LAN configuration, you may have noticed the description of block private addresses and loopback addresses makes reference to RFC 1918 and RFC 4193. RFC stands for Request for Comments; these are documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and in spite of their deceptively informal title, RFCs are actually specifications and standards for internet-related technologies. RFC 1918 and 4193, for example, describe private addressing for IPv4 and IPv6 networks respectively. If you wish to read an RFC, navigate to: https://tools.ietf.org/html/, which allows you to retrieve RFCs by numbers or draft names.