his book aims to provide you with in-depth knowledge of a very widely used technology, pfSense. This will provide you with some real-world scenarios and use cases, which you will be able to leverage immediately in your own projects. The introductory modules will help you to understand what pfSense is, its features, the key services it provides, and how you can install it. After the introductory modules, we will deep dive into each of its exciting features. You'll learn about the installation, configuration, and use of pfSense. This education will enable you to do everything from setting up firewalls, load balancing, and failover settings, to integrating with other software such as OpenVPN and Squid proxy server.

In this book, we will give you the information you need in order to work with this amazing piece of software.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to pfSense. You will gain an understanding of what pfSense is, its key features, and its advantages. You will also view demonstrations on the installation of pfSense on a virtual platform on VMware, as well as some other configurations. Let's get started.