5 Amazing PfSense Features

PfSense is well-known for offering lots of characteristics which might be only otherwise obtainable on high priced commercial firewalls. Moreover, using the release of pfSense 2.0 in 2011, many new capabilities have been added to the software. Listed here are five options that offer compelling factors to deploy pfSense in your network. Get extra info about Pfsense Router



[1] Load balancing: Using numerous components with load balancing, a method for distributing workloads across many computers or other resources, may perhaps increase reliability. It is commonly only important within big or sensitive systems (for instance, well known web sites, massive IRC networks, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP and DNS servers), and not all firewall and router products support load balancing. pfSense, nonetheless, supports it, and can be configured to load-balance or failover redundant WAN interfaces. Load-balancing will divide all traffic among the interfaces when failover will use a single interface, but upon failover it can automatically switch to one more. This brings us towards the subsequent feature:



[2] Failover: PfSense might be configured to switch to a redundant or standby laptop or computer server, system, hardware element or network upon the failure or abnormal termination from the previously active application, server, system, hardware component or network. For instance, you could configure pfSense to automatically redirect traffic from the primary webserver to a backup webserver in the even of a failure. You are able to even configure multiple pfSense systems for failover, so if one pfSense computer goes down, the firewall still functions.



[3] Customizable guidelines: All firewalls have rules, but pfSense, especially with version 2.0, has created guidelines extremely customizable. As an example, a rule may be setup to only accept traffic from a certain OS (Windows. MacOS and Linux are supported, obviously, too as a number of UNIXoid variants and Novell). Also, there is a scheduling option, so rules will only invoked through specific hours and days, and quite a few other options.



[4] MAC address spoofing: The majority of the time, an ISP registers the client's MAC address for service and billing services. This can be circumvented quickly by MAC spoofing, and it truly is trivially straightforward in pfSense, where MAC spoofing is as uncomplicated as typing within a various MAC address for any network interface. This could be handy if you'd like to force the ISP's DHCP server to lease you a new IP address, or for other motives.



[5] VPN: Most firewalls and routers support virtual private networks (VPNs), but couple of have the flexibility of pfSense. For instance, m0n0wall supports VPNs, and has many on the options you'd expect to see for VPNs (e.g. support for diverse encryption and hash algorithms and diverse authentication solutions), but m0n0wall only supports the IPSec and PPTP protocols. PfSense, on the other hand, supports IPSec and PPTP at the same time as OpenVPN and L2TP protocols, and has several advanced options, for instance NAT traversal (allowing customers to connect from behind restrictive firewalls) and dual peer detection.



This list of capabilities isn't, by any signifies an exhaustive one, but these are some of the causes why pfSense is a lot more flexible and effective than competing firewall/router products.