Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for flexible 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. Through this book you will see that pfSense offers numerous alternatives to fit any environment's security needs. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook is the first and only book to explore all the features of pfSense, including those released in the latest 2.0 version. With the help of step-by-step instructions and detailed screenshots of the pfSense interface you will be able to configure every general and advanced feature from creating a firewall rule to configuring multi-WAN failover. Each recipe includes tips and offers advice on variations of the topic or references to other related recipes and additional information that can be found from other sources. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook covers the gamut of available features and functionality. The first three chapters will take you from a non-existent system to a basic pfSense firewall. The next chapter focuses on configuring any number of the VPN services available, a very important and sought-after feature for anyone implementing a firewall. The following two chapters describe how to configure the most advanced features available in pfSense; features that may only be relevant to the most experienced network admins. Chapter 7 is dedicated to understanding and configuring the "grab-bag" of features that are available in pfSense, but are often stand-alone options and unrelated to each other. The first appendix explains how to use the status monitoring tools available for many of the features. The second appendix wraps up with helping you to decide how and where pfSense may be incorporated into your system and what type of hardware is required based on your throughput needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
pfSense 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Enabling SNMP


SNMP stands for the Simple Network Management Protocol, a standard protocol enabling SNMP clients to query status information on machines that support SNMP.

This recipe describes how to enable the SNMP service in pfSense.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to Services | SNMP.

  2. Check Enable SNMP Daemon.

  3. Leave Polling Port set to the default of UDP 161.

  4. Specify a System Location.

  5. Specify a System Contact.

  6. Specify a Read Community String. The community string is roughly equivalent to a password and changing its value will ensure only authorized SNMP clients will be able to query the SNMP information from this machine.

    Note

    Be aware that SNMPv2 lacks encrypted connections.

  7. Select the SNMP Modules to be queried.

  8. Save the changes.

How it works...

Enabling SNMP on pfSense will allow administrators to query vital system information from the SNMP client of their choice.

There's more...

SNMP traps are sent by SNMP-enabled devices (like pfSense) to specified servers when a significant event occurs. SNMP trap servers...