Introduction

Routing and bridging are often employed for similar reasons, but there are significant differences between the two. Routing refers to the process of moving packets between two or more networks, while bridging refers to connecting two or more network segments together. Thus, routing involves inter-network traffic, while bridging can involve intra-network traffic.

Routing

Most routing in pfSense is handled transparently, and, as a result, we tend to take it for granted. A pfSense router will know where to send traffic between two networks if both networks are connected to pfSense. If it doesn't know where to send a packet, pfSense will send it, by default, to the gateway, which in most cases is the WAN interface. Thus, if we request Google's home page, pfSense's routing daemon will realize that Google's IP address is not on any of the local networks and send the request through the default gateway.

 

 

There are cases, however, where the destination network is a local network not directly...