What this book covers

Chapter 1, Initial Configuration covers the settings needed for almost every pfSense deployment including those for a firewall, router, and wireless access point. Through the recipes in this chapter, you will learn how to install and configure pfSense with a fully-operational firewall and router.

Chapter 2, Essential Services explains how to configure the essential networking services provided by pfSense such as the DHCP server and dynamic DNS services.

Chapter 3, General Configuration describes how to configure NAT and firewall rules and the features associated with them.

Chapter 4, Virtual Private Networking describes how to configure pfSense to serve any or all of the four major VPN implementations—IPSec, L2TP, OpenVPN, and PPTP.

Chapter 5, Advanced Configuration covers advanced networking features such as configuring different types of virtual IP, creating gateways, and bridging interfaces.

Chapter 6, Redundancy, Load Balancing, and Failover contains recipes explaining how to load-balance or failover the multi-WAN interfaces to protect large and sensitive systems.

Chapter 7, Services and Maintenance describes all the networking services and features offered in pfSense such as configuring external logging (syslog server), enabling Wake On LAN (WOL), and configuring automatic configuration file backup.

Appendix A, Monitoring and Logging includes the features available in pfSense to help you monitor your system and also covers how to use different logging tools built into pfSense.

Appendix B, Determining our Hardware Requirements will show you how to choose the best pfSense configuration after you determine your firewall requirements. You will even learn how and where to deploy pfSense to fit your environment's security needs.