While high-speed Internet connectivity is becoming more and more common, many in the online world—especially those with residential connections or small office/home office (SOHO) setups—lack the hardware to fully take advantage of those speeds. Fiber optic technology brings with it the promise of a gigabit speed or greater, and the technology surrounding traditional copper networks is also yielding improvements. Yet many people are using consumer-grade routers that offer, at best, mediocre performance.
pfSense, an open source router/firewall solution is a far better alternative that is available to you. You have likely already downloaded, installed, and configured pfSense, possibly in a residential or SOHO environment. As an intermediate-level pfSense user, you do not need to be sold on the benefits of pfSense. Nevertheless, you may be looking to deploy pfSense in a different environment (for example, a corporate network), or you may just be looking to enhance your knowledge of pfSense. In either case, mastering the topics in this book will help you achieve these goals.
This chapter is designed to review the process of getting your pfSense system up and running. It will guide you through the process of choosing the right hardware for your deployment, but it will not provide a detailed treatment of installation and initial configuration. The emphasis will be on troubleshooting, as well as some of the newer configuration options. Finally, the chapter will provide a brief treatment of how to upgrade, back up, and restore pfSense.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
- A brief overview of the pfSense project
- pfSense deployment scenarios
- Minimum specifications and hardware sizing guidelines
- An introduction to Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) and Domain Name System (DNS)
- The best practices for installation and configuration
- Basic configuration from both the console and the pfSense web GUI
- Upgrading, backing up, and restoring pfSense
The origins of pfSense can be traced to the OpenBSD packet filter known as PF, which was incorporated into FreeBSD in 2001. As PF is limited to a command-line interface, several projects have been launched in order to provide a graphical interface for PF. m0n0wall, which was released in 2003, was the earliest attempt at such a project. pfSense began as a fork of the m0n0wall project.
Version 1.0 of pfSense was released on October 4, 2006. Version 2.0 was released on September 17, 2011. Version 2.1 was released on September 15, 2013, and Version 2.2 was released on January 23, 2015. At the time of writing, version 2.2.6 (released on December 21, 2015) is the latest version. Version 2.3 is expected to be released soon, and will be a watershed release in many respects. The web GUI has had a major facelift, and support for some legacy technologies is being phased out. Support for Point-to-Point Tunnelling Protocol (PPTP) will be discontinued, as will support for Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP). The current version of pfSense incorporates such functions as traffic shaping, the ability to act as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client/server, IPv6 support, and through packages, intrusion detection and prevention, the ability to act as a proxy server, spam and virus blocking, and much more.