5 Awesome PfSense Features

PfSense is well-famous for offering many features which are only otherwise on pricey commercial firewalls. Additionally, while using the relieve pfSense 2. this year, several abilities are really place in the program. Listed here are five features that offer compelling why you should deploy pfSense within your network.

[1] Load balancing: Using multiple components with load balancing, a process for disbursing workloads across multiple computers or any other sources, may increase reliability. It’s generally only necessary within large or sensitive systems (for instance, popular websites, large IRC systems, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP and DNS servers), instead of all firewall and router products support load balancing. pfSense, however, supports it, and it is configured to load-balance or failover redundant WAN interfaces. Load-balancing will divide all traffic one of the interfaces while failover uses just one interface, but upon failover it’ll instantly change to another. This improves the following feature:

[2] Failover: PfSense may be configured to change having a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination within the formerly active application, server, system, hardware component or network. For instance, you’ll be able to configure pfSense to immediately redirect traffic however webserver having a backup webserver within the even in the failure. You may also configure multiple pfSense systems for failover, if a person pfSense computer goes lower, the firewall still functions.

[3] Customizable rules: All firewalls have rules, but pfSense, particularly with version 5., makes rules highly customizable. For instance, useful information may be produced only accept traffic within the certain OS (Home home home windows. MacOS and Linux are supported, clearly, furthermore with a amount of UNIXoid variants and Novell). In addition, there’s a scheduling option, so rules only will invoked during certain hrs and days, along with other available choices.

[4] MAC address spoofing: Generally, an ISP registers the client’s MAC address for service and billing services. This can be frequently circumvented easily by MAC spoofing, that’s trivially easy in pfSense, where MAC spoofing is really simply by entering another MAC address for almost any network interface. This can be frequently handy if you wish to pressure the ISP’s DHCP server to lease a completely new Ip, along with other reasons.

[5] Virtual private network: Most firewalls and routers support virtual private systems (VPNs), but number of contain the versatility of pfSense. For instance, m0n0wall supports VPNs, and possesses a lot of the options you recognized to discover for VPNs (e.g. support for several file file file encryption and hash algorithms along with other authentication methods), but m0n0wall only sports ths IPSec and PPTP protocols. PfSense, however, supports IPSec and PPTP furthermore to OpenVPN and L2TP protocols, and possesses many advanced options, for example NAT traversal (allowing users enabling you to connect from behind restrictive firewalls) and dual peer recognition.