Mastering pfSense - Second Edition: Manage, secure, and monitor your on-premise and cloud network with pfSense 2.4 - Softcover

Zientara, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1788993179 ISBN 13: 9781788993173

Publisher: Packt Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Install and configure a pfSense router/firewall, and become a pfSense expert in the process.

Key Features

• You can always do more to secure your software – so extend and customize your pfSense firewall
• Build a high availability security system that’s fault-tolerant – and capable of blocking potential threats
• Put the principles of better security into practice by implementing examples provided in the text

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Configure pfSense services such as DHCP, Dynamic DNS, captive portal, DNS, NTP and SNMP
• Set up a managed switch to work with VLANs
• Use pfSense to allow, block and deny traffic, and to implement Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Make use of the traffic shaper to lower and raise the priority of certain types of traffic
• Set up and connect to a VPN tunnel with pfSense
• Incorporate redundancy and high availability by utilizing load balancing and the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP)
• Explore diagnostic tools in pfSense to solve network problems

Who This Book Is For

This book is for those with at least an intermediate understanding of networking. Prior knowledge of pfSense would be helpful but is not required.

Those who have the resources to set up a pfSense firewall, either in a real or virtual environment, will especially benefit, as they will be able to follow along with the examples in the book.

Table of Contents

1. Revisiting pfSense Basics
2. Advanced pfSense Configuration
3. VLANs
4. Using pfSense as a Firewall
5. Network Address Translation
6. Traffic Shaping
7. Virtual Private Networks
8. Redundancy and High Availability
9. Multiple WANs
10. Routing and Bridging
11. Extending pfSense with Packages
12. Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
13. Assessments

About this title

About the Author

David Zientara is a software engineer and IT professional living in northern New Jersey. He has 20 years of experience in IT and has been an enthusiastic supporter of the free and open source software (FOSS) community throughout his career, beginning with his first foray into the open source world with Slackware Linux in 1995.

In the mid-1990s, David became a lead software engineer for Oxberry LLC, a digital imaging company headquartered in New Jersey. In this capacity, he played a major role in developing a new software package for the company's film scanners for Windows while also helping maintain Oxberry's legacy software, which had been developed for the SGI IRIX platform. He continued in this role for many years and continues to play a part in software development for Oxberry's corporate successor. In the mid-2000s, David took an interest in computer networking, an interest that led him to learn about m0n0wall and, eventually, pfSense, a fork of the m0n0wall project. His interest in pfSense prompted him to create a pfSense website, in June 2013.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1788993179
• ISBN 13: 9781788993173
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 450