PfSense is well-known for giving lots of characteristics which can be only otherwise available on expensive commercial firewalls. Additionally, with all the release of pfSense 2.0 in 2011, quite a few new features have already been added to the software. Listed here are 5 characteristics that offer compelling motives to deploy pfSense on your network. Get far more information about Pfsense Router
[1] Load balancing: Using several components with load balancing, a method for distributing workloads across several computer systems or other resources, might raise reliability. It's normally only needed inside huge or sensitive systems (one example is, well-known web sites, significant IRC networks, high-bandwidth FTP sites, NNTP and DNS servers), and not all firewall and router products help load balancing. pfSense, however, supports it, and can be configured to load-balance or failover redundant WAN interfaces. Load-balancing will divide all traffic amongst the interfaces when failover will use a single interface, but upon failover it'll automatically switch to yet another. This brings us towards the next function:
[2] Failover: PfSense might be configured to switch to a redundant or standby personal computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination with the previously active application, server, system, hardware component or network. As an example, you might configure pfSense to automatically redirect traffic in the primary webserver to a backup webserver inside the even of a failure. You could even configure various pfSense systems for failover, so if one pfSense computer system goes down, the firewall nonetheless functions.
[3] Customizable rules: All firewalls have rules, but pfSense, specially with version 2.0, has produced guidelines hugely customizable. One example is, a rule may be setup to only accept traffic from a particular OS (Windows. MacOS and Linux are supported, of course, at the same time as a number of UNIXoid variants and Novell). Additionally, there's a scheduling option, so rules will only invoked in the course of particular hours and days, and many 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 could be circumvented very easily by MAC spoofing, and it can be trivially simple in pfSense, where MAC spoofing is as easy as typing in a various MAC address for a network interface. This can be handy if you want 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 support virtual private networks (VPNs), but handful of have the flexibility of pfSense. By way of example, m0n0wall supports VPNs, and has several of your options you'd count on to see for VPNs (e.g. assistance for different encryption and hash algorithms and unique authentication approaches), 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 many advanced options, like NAT traversal (enabling users to connect from behind restrictive firewalls) and dual peer detection.
This list of capabilities is just not, by any means an exhaustive one, but these are several of the factors why pfSense is much more flexible and effective than competing firewall/router products.
