Why should I study pfSense?

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Why should I study pfSense
Image by Roshan Deshapriya from Pixabay

There are a great many distributions for building routers and firewalls. However, most of them are based on the Linux kernel. But in addition to Linux, there are other kernels, and on their basis, you can also make specialized distributions. One of them, pfSense.

pfSense is based on the FreeBSD kernel, but does not require any OS-specific knowledge and skills, so PfSense Firewall Corporate Training will be easy. I must say that pfSense has extensive functionality. Therefore, during the training, everything is shown to you in real time with additional presentations and lectures.

pfSense features the following features:

  • standard filtering based on source/destination addresses and ports;
  • filtering based on fingerprinting of the OS with which the connection is established (the p0f passive fingerprinting tool is used);
  • transparent firewall of the second level;
  • normalization of packets — discarding packets with incorrectly formed fields, which can, in principle, be a specific way of attack;
  • connection status support;
  • flexible NAT support;
  • VPN — IPsec, PPTP and OpenVPN are supported;
  • monitoring and statistics. Drawing graphs using RRD and in real time;
  • a lot of DDNS services.

Firewall

If you will be on PfSense Firewall Training, you will be familiarized with all the settings in detail. The Firewall menu contains settings for NAT, aliases for addresses and ports, traffic shaping, enabling scheduled rules, and the rules themselves. The rules are executed before the first match, that is, for example, if you put the rule “Prohibit everything” first, all other rules will not work. pfSense really has the widest set of features: in addition to standard filtering by addresses and ports/numbers of ICMP messages, it supports the creation of rules based on the state of connections, and filtering based on TCP flags, and even support for “deep” peeking into application protocols (Layer 7 according to the OSI model) for filtering gaming and P2P-traffic.

Therefore, it is worth learning how to use this program.