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)

Basic concepts

Sometimes, we want higher uptime and a higher throughput with our internet connection, and when we do, multiple WAN interfaces providing multiple internet connections is a way of doing this. Before you implement multi-WAN, you must already have a working LAN and WAN interface. Additional WAN interfaces are referred to as OPT WAN interfaces, and pfSense can support several WAN interfaces.

In order to fully take advantage of a multi-WAN setup, however, you should have separate internet connections. Ideally, you should have separate internet connections from separate internet providers, because there is a higher likelihood of a connectivity issue between your network and a provider affecting all connections to that provider than there is that a connectivity issue would affect multiple providers at the same time. And of course, if you have two connections to the same...