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Pfsense Introduction
As per official website of developers of pfSense® software is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD specifically tailored for use as a firewall and router that is entirely managed via web interface. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution.
The pfSense project is hosted and developed by Rubicon Communications, LLC (Netgate). Pfsense can be used as Firewall, Proxy Server, Link Load balancer, VPN Server and much more as different addons can be installed to this wonderful BSD distribution to enable different functionalities.
Pfsense as Proxy Server
Since Microsoft Ended support for Threat Management Gateway. People started searching for a reliable proxy server to replace TMG. A solution that can Provide advanced features like HTTPS Inspection, Content Filtering, Link Load Balancing and AV Scanning.
There are number of alternatives available like IPCop, Pfsense that are easy to install. But all of them at least the community/free version in case both supports limited number of users at-most 100 works fine, even thou i was able to test 300+ users with minimum problems.
Installation
Installation procedure is simple as explained in attached video. The demo install uses following configuration for Virtual Server.
RAM 8 GB, 4 logical Processor , 50GB Hard Disk.
In production environment its recommend also allocate appropriate space for logs. and ram may be allocated 4GB at least for 100 Users for best performance.
After text based install is complete default credentials are as follows:
user: admin
Password: pfsence
hn0 is public interface ( The link to Internet) hn1 in this case is LAN Interface. if you are load balancing the you might have hn0 and hn1 for public and hn2 for LAN.
Hope you find this interesting, enjoy the video!
Alternative Video
