You will also want to download the MD5 checksum file in order to verify the integrity of the downloaded image. Verifying the integrity of downloads serves two purposes:

• It ensures that the download completed
• It safeguards against a party maliciously tampering with the images

In order to safeguard against the latter, however, be sure to download the checksum from a different mirror site than the site from which you downloaded the image. This provides an additional measure of security should an individual mirror site be compromised. Windows has several utilities for displaying MD5 hashes for a file. Under BSD and Linux, generating the MD5 hash is as easy as typing the following command:

md5 pfSense-LiveCD-2.4.3-RELEASE-amd64.iso

This command will generate the MD5 checksum for the 64-bit Live CD version for pfSense 2.4.3. Compare the resulting hash with the contents of the .md5 file that you downloaded from the pfSense website. Windows has several utilities for displaying SHA256 hashes for a file. Under BSD and Linux, generating the SHA256 hash is as easy as typing the following command:

shasum -a 256 pfSense-LiveCD-2.4.3-RELEASE-amd64.iso.gz

This command will generate the MD5 checksum for the 64-bit Live CD version for pfSense 2.4.3. Compare the resulting hash with the contents of the .sha256 file you downloaded from one of the (other) mirrors. Under BSD and Linux, generating the MD5 hash is as easy as typing the following command:

md5 pfSense-LiveCD-2.4.3-RELEASE-amd64.iso

This command will generate the MD5 checksum for the 64-bit Live CD version for pfSense 2.4.3. Compare the resulting hash with the contents of the .md5 file you downloaded from the pfSense website.

If you are doing a full install from the Live CD or memory stick, then you just need to write the ISO to the target media, boot from either the CD or memory stick, perform some basic configuration, and then invoke the installer.