pfsense firewall
Asalam o alikum brothers & Sisters, in this tutorial we will learn what is pfsense firewall and what are its uses.
pfsense is an open source operating system based on free BSD for routers and firewalls.
It comes as separate dedicated hardware like any other vendor routers/firewalls & can also be easily installed on any PC or Laptop and on a virtual machine.
At this point let’s first discuss on common uses of pfsense
Typical use of pfsense:
- Typical LAN/WAN router (Connected to ISP on one end and on the other connecting users LAN, serving as a gateway to route LAN traffic to WAN)
- Wireless Hotspot (Displaying interactive login pages to customers inorder to use the network)
- VPN Router (connecting 2 remote offices LAN by creating VPN)
- Firewall (Block/Filter malicious traffic entering or leaving the network)
- DHCP/DN server (Providing automatic IP Addressing to users in LAN and also serving as a DNS server)
- Wireless Access Point (we can configure it as an access point)
- Multi WAN Router or Load Balancer (Load balancing traffic on multiple ISP links)
- Port forwarding / NAT (Can also provide NAT and port forwarding services , just like any other router)
- Proxy server
- Web filter ( Block malicious websites)
After giving you a brief introduction of common uses , let’s talk about its hardware and software implementations.
pfsense hardware
A variety of dedicated appliances available in the market to fulfill your business needs.
Just like any other vendor devices they come in different sizes and have different features available.
Some are used in small offices or businesses while others are best suited for large sized organizations.
You can read more about different products on the link below
Official pfSense Hardware, Appliances, and Security Gateways
pfsense software
pfsense OS is based on free BSD and is easily available for download on its official website.
Once downloaded we have the option to either install it a PC/Laptop or as a virual machine on VMWARE or any other virtualization tool.
Downloading and installing pfsense is very easy. I already made a tutorial on this topic , you can refer to it by clicking on the link below.
how to download and install pfsense on vmware (2022) – IT Funkaar
You can read more on this article on the link below
