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)
Kubernetes and back - Why I don't run distributed systems, NetApp’s strategic contributions to FreeBSD: a deep dive into upstreaming efforts, Make your own E-Mail server - Part 2 - Adding Webmail and More with Nextcloud, Poudriere on Apple Silicon, One less Un*xy option for 32-bit PowerPC, and more.
A series of commits by Jeremie Courreges-Anglas (jca@) has modified tar(1) such that its default write format (for archives) is that of pax(1).
Continuation of news regarding iX focusing more on Linux and less on BSD, addressing some of the concerns of BSD users.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.
The Travel Grant Application for BSDCan 2024 is now open. The FreeBSD Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development.
The XZ Backdoor, NetBSD 10.0, iX announces that they will put out a release of TrueNAS 13.3, State of the Terminal, LibreSSL 3.8.4 and 3.9.1 released and more.
The OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 7.5, the project's 56th release, with numerous improvements and support for 14 hardware platforms. See the OpenBSD 7.5 release page for a more detailed list.
Using Git offline, Make your own E-mail server, quiz: a tool for rapid OpenZFS development, Configuring openzfs for nvme databases, Mirroring OmniOS: The Complete Guide part 1, Installing OpenBSD 7.4 on a VisionFive 2 rev, and more.
Errata patches for X11 server have been released for OpenBSD 7.5, 7.4 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.
Open source software leads the way in technology innovation, and corporate contributions to these community-driven projects significantly shape these resources. NetApp is a great example of this, as it has made strategic and multifaceted efforts to contribute to FreeBSD.
Following in-depth evaluation and collaborative discussions, Netgate announced a significant strategic shift in the technological foundation of the pfSense project. They plan the migration of the pfSense platform from the FreeBSD operating system to a Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland. This was on April 1st, but haven't seen any confirmation this being a joke.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.