PfSense is well-known for offering numerous attributes which might be only otherwise offered on pricey commercial firewalls. Additionally, together with the release of pfSense 2.0 in 2011, various new attributes have already been added to the software. Listed here are 5 attributes that offer compelling motives to deploy pfSense in your network. Get a lot more information and facts about Fanless Mini PC
[1] Load balancing: Using multiple components with load balancing, a method for distributing workloads across numerous computer systems or other resources, could enhance reliability. It truly is frequently only important within massive or sensitive systems (as an example, popular web sites, significant IRC networks, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP and DNS servers), and not all firewall and router products support load balancing. pfSense, on the other hand, supports it, and can be configured to load-balance or failover redundant WAN interfaces. Load-balancing will divide all traffic among the interfaces even though failover will use a single interface, but upon failover it will automatically switch to a further. This brings us for the next feature:
[2] Failover: PfSense is usually configured to switch to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware element or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, hardware element or network. For instance, you may configure pfSense to automatically redirect traffic in the primary webserver to a backup webserver within the even of a failure. It is possible to even configure multiple pfSense systems for failover, so if one pfSense pc goes down, the firewall nonetheless functions.
[3] Customizable rules: All firewalls have rules, but pfSense, especially with version 2.0, has produced rules hugely customizable. As an example, a rule could be setup to only accept traffic from a particular OS (Windows. MacOS and Linux are supported, of course, also as a number of UNIXoid variants and Novell). In addition, there’s a scheduling option, so guidelines will only invoked throughout specific hours and days, and various other options.
[4] MAC address spoofing: Most of the time, an ISP registers the client’s MAC address for service and billing services. This could be circumvented effortlessly by MAC spoofing, and it is actually trivially straightforward in pfSense, exactly where MAC spoofing is as straightforward as typing in a various MAC address to get a network interface. This can be handy if you’d like to force the ISP’s DHCP server to lease you a brand new IP address, or for other factors.
[5] VPN: Most firewalls and routers help virtual private networks (VPNs), but couple of possess the flexibility of pfSense. One example is, m0n0wall supports VPNs, and has lots of in the options you’d expect to view for VPNs (e.g. help for distinct encryption and hash algorithms and various authentication procedures), but m0n0wall only supports the IPSec and PPTP protocols. PfSense, alternatively, supports IPSec and PPTP too as OpenVPN and L2TP protocols, and has quite a few sophisticated options, for example NAT traversal (enabling users to connect from behind restrictive firewalls) and dual peer detection.
This list of features just isn’t, by any indicates an exhaustive one, but these are several of the factors why pfSense is a lot more flexible and strong than competing firewall/router products.
