To provide a general idea of the versatility of pfSense, consider the following use cases:
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You have a home network, and need a means of connecting the wireless devices in your house (such as computers, laptops, and tablets) to the internet. Therefore, you need a router (to connect your home network to the internet), a firewall (to perform ingress and egress filtering at the boundary between your private network and the internet), and a wireless access point (to enable wireless devices to connect to your home network). You will likely also want to have a DHCP server to assign IP addresses to devices on the network, and possibly dynamic DNS (DDNS) capabilities, so that you don't have to remember your public IP address when accessing your home network from the outside world. pfSense can perform all these functions.
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You have a small office/home office (SOHO) network, and you need to connect several computers in your company to the internet. You also want to provide a means of allowing customers to connect to the internet on the same connection, but you want to have some means of controlling their access to the network so they don't use up the bulk of available bandwidth. You also want to keep them from accessing the internal company network. Therefore, you need to have separate subnets for your internal network and for customers, a captive portal to control customers' access to your network, and possibly traffic shaping capabilities to limit the amount of bandwidth used by customers. Again, pfSense can perform all these functions.
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You are an administrator at a corporation that has an office in another city. You want to provide access to your local corporate network to workers in the remote facility, but you are concerned about confidential corporate information traveling over the public internet. A private WAN circuit is one possible option to allow remote users to connect securely to your network, but private WAN circuits are expensive. Therefore, you decide that the best option is to set up a peer-to-peer VPN connection between your local network and the remote site. You also want to have more than one internet connection, to provide redundancy when one of the connections goes down. As you might have guessed, pfSense allows you to set up VPN connections between networks, and to set up multiple WAN connections.
In short, pfSense can be used in a variety of scenarios, ranging from a simple home network with a handful of internet-connected devices to a corporate network with thousands of users. For those administering corporate networks, commercially available equipment with proprietary technology (such as Cisco switches and routers) may prove to be the better option. Such equipment often performs better under heavy load scenarios, offers integrated voice, video, and data services, and often comes bundled with technical support.
This book, however, is aimed primarily at beginners; therefore, it is generally assumed that the reader is more likely to set up a home network or SOHO network than a corporate network, in which case pfSense is generally a cost-effective, sensible option. There is a great deal of functionality built in to pfSense, and in many cases, when the base install does not provide the functionality you need, there are third-party packages available that do provide such functionality.
