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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered redundancy and high availability. To this end, we discussed different types of load balancing and the basics of CARP. We then covered how to set up server load balancing in pfSense. We moved on to CARP configuration and provided two examples of CARP setups. The first was the conventional example of a CARP failover group with two firewalls - a master and a single backup. The second showed how it is possible to use CARP with three or more firewalls, and without much more configuration than would be necessary for the two firewall group. You may never have occasion to implement such a failover group, but it is encouraging to know that such enterprise-level redundancy is available to us.

We combined our knowledge of load balancing and CARP in an example that implemented server load balancing and a firewall failover group in a single network. Finally...