OPNsense Beginner to Professional

Protect networks and build next-generation firewalls easily with OPNsense

Julio Cesar Bueno de Camargo

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

OPNsense Beginner to Professional

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First published: June 2022

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To the memory of my father, Nivaldo B. de Camargo, my life's sensei. To my wife, who always encourages and supports me with her unconditional love and dedication, and our daughter, Maria Catarina, our little angel! To all friends (especially the Cloudfence team!) and family who supported me during this journey! To God, for keeping me standing to face life's challenges.

– Julio Cesar B. de Camargo

Contributors

About the author

Julio Cesar Bueno de Camargo is a cybersecurity professional with 15+ years of experience working with open source software. He started with Conectiva Linux and later became the official instructor helping dozens of students. As an aviation enthusiast and airplane pilot, he strives to bring all the aviation best practices to his professional routine.

Julio started working with OPNsense in 2016, contributing to the project with code, official forum moderation, articles, a Udemy course, and promotions in Brazil and Europe. He founded CloudFence in 2018, a cybersecurity start-up and a Luso-Brazilian-managed security services firm with an open source DNA. As its CTO, Julio aims to spread open source security as a service to companies from different parts of the world.

First, I want to thank my wife, the love of my life, Maria Eugenia, she always makes me believe! To our baby, Maria Catarina, daddy loves you! Also, I want to thank tech reviewers Franz Fabian and Nicolas Goralski ... and all the Packt team! To the OPNsense community that maintains this fantastic open source security project! To my teammates at Cloudfence. Last but not least, my friends and family were essential in motivating me to write this book!

About the reviewers

Fabian Franz BSc is a senior software developer (mainly working in the Jakarta EE / Spring and JavaScript environment nowadays) who has a strong security background. He was a pupil at HTL Dornbirn when his team won the Austrian Cyber Security Challenge national final. He continued studying for a bachelor's degree in Sichere Informationssysteme (secure information systems) at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria – Campus Hagenberg.

While Fabian was studying at the university, at some point, he read an article about a new firewall appliance on the internet. He was interested and started contributing quite quickly. Since then, he has written a few OPNsense plugins (such as the os-nginx plugin, covered in this book).

I have to thank all my teachers, who always taught me more than needed, which helped me to learn more to become an expert in specific areas. I also have to thank all those developers of open source software / free software out there whose software I use daily and which makes a firewall distribution such as OPNsense or a Linux distribution possible. A special thanks also to Ad and Franco for all the help I got when I learned how OPNsense works.

Nicolas Goralski is a Linux system engineer with over 24 years of experience in various companies.

Nicolas has a global vision of IT architectures to better understand business projects and propose the best economic and technical approach to achieve customer satisfaction.

Motivated by the leitmotiv Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) and what can be automated must be automated, Nicolas uses open source technology as much as he can to fulfill his duty.

To my wife, Isabelle, who has believed in me for years and who supports me, I love you.

To my kids, who try to understand what I do, and the fact that I'm not always playing on my computer.

To my family and friends, thank you for everything you have given me.

To Packt Publishing, thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this book.

To all the network packets that I've blocked, it's not personal, it's business.