You're reading from OPNsense Beginner to Professional Protect networks and build next-generation firewalls easily with OPNsense

Product type Paperback

Published in Jun 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801816878

Length 464 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

FreeBSD

Concepts

Network Security

Author (1):

Julio Cesar Bueno de Camargo

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Table of Contents (25) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Initial Configuration

2. Chapter 1: An OPNsense Overview FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Installing OPNsense

4. Chapter 3: Configuring an OPNsense Network

5. Chapter 4: System Configuration

6. Section 2: Securing the Network

7. Chapter 5: Firewall

8. Chapter 6: Network Address Translation (NAT)

9. Chapter 7: Traffic Shaping

10. Chapter 8: Virtual Private Networking

11. Chapter 9: Multi-WAN – Failover and Load Balancing

12. Chapter 10: Reporting

13. Section 3: Going beyond the Firewall

14. Chapter 11: Deploying DHCP in OPNsense

15. Chapter 12: DNS Services

16. Chapter 13: Web Proxy

17. Chapter 14: Captive Portal

18. Chapter 15: Network Intrusion (Detection and Prevention) Systems

19. Chapter 16: Next-Generation Firewall with Zenarmor

20. Chapter 17: Firewall High Availability

21. Chapter 18: Website Protection with OPNsense

22. Chapter 19: Command-Line Interface

23. Chapter 20: API – Application Programming Interface

24. Other Books You May Enjoy

Rock-solid FreeBSD – HardenedBSD

Before exploring OPNsense, let's look at its kernel: the almighty FreeBSD, the operating system that has the power to serve!

FreeBSD

First, FreeBSD isn't Linux! If you are a long-time FreeBSD user, don't be mad with me, as you probably have heard this statement before! If not and you thought that FreeBSD and Linux were the same, no problem! That is a common mistake people make. Let's first find out what FreeBSD is in a short introduction.

FreeBSD is a free and open source operating system. It is a Unix-like system but different from Linux; it is a complete operating system, including the kernel, drivers, and other user utilities and applications. Linux only includes the kernel and drivers, and everything else is built as the distribution or just distro. The FreeBSD project has an outstanding security reputation, and it has a dedicated team taking care of this at the code level. This has built a well-known reputation for a very secure operating system!

If you have never installed FreeBSD before, you must be thinking that you will use it for the first time on OPNsense, right? Not necessarily! You have probably used FreeBSD a lot already. Don't believe me? One of the strong points of the FreeBSD project is its licensing model, which is considered permissive. Add to that the system liability, robust security, and good hardware support and you have a lot of reasons to choose FreeBSD as your new product base operating system. Many companies have – Apple's macOS, iOS, and other OSes are based on FreeBSD code, Sony PlayStations 3 and 4 use it, and many network appliances make use of it too! If you have an iPhone, that also runs a FreeBSD-based operating system!

Now that we are introduced to OPNsense's operating system, let's explore why we should consider it for our network firewall.