Reed Media Services recently published its second detailed book about the pfSense networking gateway. The book, pfSense Essentials, covers its installation and basic configuration through advanced networking and firewalling.
pfSense is a commonly-used network management interface for enabling VPNs, captive portals, and other shared network services. Powered on top of FreeBSD, it is based on open source software like OpenBSD PF packet filter, OpenBSD relayd, NTP, NGINX, Unbound, MPD, OpenVPN, StrongSwan, ISC DHCP, and many others. The pfSense Essentials book helps network administrators take advantage of the latest pfSense features and teaches about advanced capabilities provided by these technologies.
The pfSense Essentials book is the complete reference to the pfSense Internet gateway and firewall. This book covers the entire web and console interface in detail and includes instructions on implementing network time service, VPN connections, load balancers, VLANs, traffic shaping, schedule-based packet filtering, and much more. The book also emphasizes the several diagnostic interfaces for troubleshooting and understanding network and system behavior, including graphs, log monitoring, and network probes and traces. Every pfSense submenu feature is described in the 478 page book.
This book covers pfSense version 2.4.4 and includes features from older and newer versions. Since the publisher's 2009 book, pfSense has introduced many new features which are explained in this new book, such as IPv6 configurations, Unbound for DNS caching service, hybrid outbound NAT, and multiple captive portals.
The book is authored by Jeremy C. Reed, a long-time BSD Unix developer and professional. He helped develop the BSD Certification and served on The NetBSD Foundation board for a decade. Reed has taught over 85 lectures and workshops covering open source packaging, Unix security, network administration, and related topics.
For more information about the pfSense Essentials book, visit http://reedmedia.net/books/pfsense/ . The book is available at various book stores including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. (ISBN 978-1-937516-04-8)