“Imagine this scenario: Another business group in your midsize company needs some new network connectivity, but they also require a number of network security features, including an integrated access point, user authentication, VPN capabilities, and a firewall to separate a certain group from the rest of the network. Oh, and they also want access to Snort and Nmap. Luckily, pfSense offers all of these features along with a number of customization options.”

Keith Barker explains in this video tutorial how to configure an SMB-caliber firewall

Ever wanted to set up a pfSense firewall/router with content filtering? Howtoforge has one of the easiest tutorials to help you set this up. If you have a spare box, there’s no reason now to wait any longer: pfSense – Squid + Squidguard / Traffic Shapping Tutorial

In this tutorial I will show you how to set up pfSense 2.0.1 up as an Internet Gateway with Squid Proxy / Squidguard Filtering. I will also show that you have to configure some extra features of pfSense like traffic shapping with squid.

There’s a very useful howto on the pfsense forums showing step-by-step how to run pfSense in virtualbox:

1. Get Oracle VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/ or from the repo of your distribution. Works in Windows, Linux too.
2. Download a VGA-enabled nanobsd version of pfSense from here. For example pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd_vga.img.gz.
3. Decompress the .gz to get a plain disk image .img file (you need pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd_vga.img)
4. Convert the disk image to a virtual hard disk using this command:
1. Code: VBoxManage convertfromraw pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd_vga.img pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd_vga.vdi
2. Don’t worry if the .vdi file will be much smaller. It will actually be a dynamic virtual disk, which physically occupies only the amount of data which is not empty.
5. Create a new virtual machine in VirtualBox, using these settings:
1. Enable IO APIC
2. 512MB of RAM (or more, I guess)
3. no audio, no USB
4. 2 network adapters, first bridged to your physical NIC, second “Host-Only Adapter”, both Intel PRO/1000 T Server. Untick “Cable connected”
5. a serial port, just to be sure
6. use as hard disk the .vdi image you created in step 4
6. Boot up the virtual machine, let pfSense start up
7. Assign network interfaces as usual, to simulate cable connection open “Network Adapters” window and tick back  “Cable connected” when appropriate. Make the first (em0) as WAN, the second (em1) as LAN.
8. Set manually IP address of LAN to 192.168.56.10 (or any IP within your “Host-Only Adapter network”)
9. Type your LAN address in your browser and you’re in!

pfSense is a powerful, open source, free and FreeBSD based firewall and security solution. The follwoing are three links you may be interested in if you use or would like to use pfSense.

pfSense 2.0.1 announcement

Chris Buechler has announced the release of pfSense 2.0.1. This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since 2.0 release. This is the recommended release for all installations.

How To Use pfSense to load balance your Web Servers

This howto shows you how to configure pfSense 2.0 as a load balancer for your web servers. It is assumed that you already have a pfSense box and at least 2 Apache servers installed and running on your network, and that you have some pfSense knowledge.

How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Server

pfSense Cookbook

There’s a great pfSense reference book published earlier this year, pfSense 2 Cookbook. It’s great for network admins, but also the casuel pfSense user. It’s a preatical, example-driven guide to configure the simple and the most advanced features for pfSense.

The chapters in the book are:

• Initial Configuratino
• Essential Services
• General Configuration
• Virtual Private Networking
• Advance Configuration
• Redundancy, load balancing and fail over
• Services and maintenance
• Appendix 1 – Monitoring and logging
• Appendix 2 – Determining hardware requirements

The book is full with screenshots, explaining all the different settings.

You can “look inside” book: pfSense Cookbook

Ray has been testing and playing around with pfSense for a month, and has decided he’s going to set up a private cloud: pfSense + 1 Public IP = Home Cloud.

Now that I’ve ben running pfSense for a problem-free month it’s time to start using it for more than cool charts and graphs. My first goal is to be able to make multiple servers available from the internet. I’ve got Windows Home Server v1 and Windows Home Server 2011 servers running and ready to go. Once those are going I’ll want to add my development web server to the mix so I can do development and testing from outside the home. I’ve spent some time testing various options and I’ve settled on a solution that I think will work. At least all the individual pieces work, time to see if they fit together.

The main obstacle for me is that I have one public IP which needs to address the various internal servers. Those internal servers run the same services on the same ports. The nature of NAT port forwarding is all traffic coming into the WAN connection for a port gets forwarded to the same computer. I can’t parse port 80 (http/web) traffic and make a decision where it needs to go. This is the major obstacle. Another minor issue is that my public IP is dynamic and can change whenever Comcast wants to change it. (Although when I want it to change it’s surprisingly hard to do).

Another requirement is that I use my own domain, and not just a subdomain of some DDNS provider.

Full post: pfSense +1  public ip = home Cloud

pfSense Jobs

If you’re interested in pfSense freelance jobs, have a look here: https://www.elance.com/r/jobs/q-pFsense. There’s one job at the moment.