PfSense is well-known for providing several attributes which can be only otherwise available on expensive commercial firewalls. Additionally, together with the release of pfSense 2.0 in 2011, a number of new capabilities have been added to the software. Listed here are 5 capabilities that present compelling reasons to deploy pfSense in your network. Get additional details about pfsense wifi access point
[1] Load balancing: Using several components with load balancing, a method for distributing workloads across several computers or other sources, might increase reliability. It truly is commonly only required within big or sensitive systems (for example, well-liked web sites, significant IRC networks, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP and DNS servers), and not all firewall and router products assistance 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 although failover will use a single interface, but upon failover it will automatically switch to another. This brings us for the subsequent feature:
[2] Failover: PfSense could be configured to switch to a redundant or standby pc server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination in 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 in the even of a failure. It is possible to even configure multiple pfSense systems for failover, so if one pfSense computer goes down, the firewall nevertheless functions.
[3] Customizable rules: All firewalls have rules, but pfSense, especially with version 2.0, has produced rules highly customizable. As an example, a rule is often setup to only accept traffic from a specific OS (Windows. MacOS and Linux are supported, certainly, also as a number of UNIXoid variants and Novell). Furthermore, there's a scheduling option, so rules will only invoked throughout particular 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 conveniently by MAC spoofing, and it really is trivially easy in pfSense, exactly where MAC spoofing is as easy as typing within a various MAC address for any network interface. This can be handy if you would like to force the ISP's DHCP server to lease you a brand new IP address, or for other causes.
[5] VPN: Most firewalls and routers help virtual private networks (VPNs), but couple of have the flexibility of pfSense. For example, m0n0wall supports VPNs, and has quite a few on the options you would anticipate to find out for VPNs (e.g. assistance for distinctive encryption and hash algorithms and different authentication strategies), but m0n0wall only supports the IPSec and PPTP protocols. PfSense, alternatively, supports IPSec and PPTP at the same time as OpenVPN and L2TP protocols, and has numerous sophisticated options, for example NAT traversal (allowing customers to connect from behind restrictive firewalls) and dual peer detection.
This list of attributes is just not, by any implies an exhaustive one, but they are a few of the causes why pfSense is additional flexible and powerful than competing firewall/router products.
