Are pfsense firewalls any good for home or business? Which businesses are supported by pfsense? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using pfsense? How big can they go? Lots of questions! Fortunately Tom answers these and many more in this video. // MENU // 00:00 ▶ Introduction 01:29 ▶ What pfSense is and Tom's experience with pfSense 03:43 ▶ Tom and Open Source 04:38 ▶ The benefit of pfSense being Open Source 05:21 ▶ Systems Tom has deployed with pfSense 07:22 ▶ pfSense licensing cost 09:09 ▶ Using pfSense at home 11:45 ▶ Virtualization 12:28 ▶ Raspberry Pi support 13:02 ▶ Virtualization vs hardware 14:37 ▶ Tom's recommendation for small/medium businesses 19:43 ▶ pfSense actual cost (pfSense vs pfSense+) 22:22 ▶ Reasons not to use pfSense 24:45 ▶ Tom's biggest pfSense deployment 26:07 ▶ pfSense above 10G 27:11 ▶ pfSense and VPN 28:32 ▶ Handling lots of VPN connections 29:29 ▶ Advice for starting a consulting business 31:09 ▶ Technical skills vs sales skills 32:22 ▶ The benefit of having sales skills 35:58 ▶ It's about the customer, not the product you use 38:02 ▶ How Tom got his first customers 40:21 ▶ Why Tom has a RU-vid channel 43:46 ▶ This video is not sponsored by a VPN company 43:53 ▶ Skills to learn in 2022 to get started 48:13 ▶ Story 1 - Hacked client 49:10 ▶ Story 2 - That will never happen in the real world 51:28 ▶ Story 3- We've all done it 52:40 ▶ Final advice 54:15 ▶ Networking with people // David's SOCIAL // Discord: discord.com/invite/usKSyzb Twitter: twitter.com/davidbombal Instagram: instagram.com/davidbombal LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidbombal Facebook: facebook.com/davidbombal.co TikTok: tiktok.com/@davidbombal RU-vid: ru-vid.com // Tom's SOCIAL // Twitter: twitter.com/TomLawrenceTech RU-vid: ru-vid.com Website: lawrencesystems.com/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencesystems/ Instagram: instagram.com/lawrencesystems/ // MY STUFF // www.amazon.com/shop/davidbombal // SPONSORS // Interested in sponsoring my videos? Reach out to my team here: sponsors@davidbombal.com Please note that links listed may be affiliate links and provide me with a small percentage/kickback should you use them to purchase any of the items listed or recommended. Thank you for supporting me and this channel!
PFSense is better than no firewall. However it pales in comparison to enterprise grade NGFW. As someone who has architected in the network security space for going on 12 years now, enterprise grade functions, filters, application awareness, cloud content analysis, AV engines, and vulnerability protections of Palo Alto, Fortinet, Checkpoint, and even firepower blow PFSense out of the water. However, would I trust PFsense in my home network? Yes. Would I trust it in a simple SMB? Yes. The differentiating factor for me is WHO is managing it. Is it mr CEO do it all? Or is it a MSP? However, vendors like fortinet for example have firewalls at a very affordable price. Heck Even Palo Alto has affordable firewalls now. I just finished a BOM where we bought 1Gbps firewalls with a bundle of NGFW features and we paid $2800 for 3 years.
After several failures with commercial firewalls that won't patch issues many of my vendors are now recommending OpnSense. I use it for many projects and would be comfortable using it at my workplace come hardware refresh time. Especially with the security features it has.
Tom has taught me so much about pfsense through his videos. I've been running it since 2015. I started off with a Netgate SG3100 but ran out of puff when I upgraded my WAN to 1Gb. So I bought a second hand Dell R210 M2 with a 4 port Intel NIC and rolled my own pfsense box. Reddit was useful to get suggestions for the best hardware platform for my needs and I paid about £170 in total for the machine, NIC and SSD that it runs on. I have multiple VLANs for different networks, WAN redundancy over 4G, multiple OpenVPN servers for me and the segregated guest network, custom firewall rules and UPS monitoring. All of this I've learned from Tom's videos. Tom's video's are a total wealth of guidance and help and his delivery is such that he gives a lot of confidence. If I want to do something with pfsense, Tom's channel is the first place I go to.
I have been running PFSense since at least 2011 Started with a Pentium 4 HT box and 100mb nic and gig intel pci nic and 512mb ram. As time went on i virtualized it in around 2015 and as of about 2019 run a dedicated box once again when I upgraded to gig internet connection. Which consists of an i3 2100 and 2 gigs ram with a couple intel e1000 nics. Great setup for just a regular geeked out family of 4. The virtual server I had was not coping too well with the gig connection and rather than upgrade a server that otherwise worked well for my needs, just build a dedicated box to make use of the hardware offload those inexpensive intel nics offer. And its hardware that allows me to tweak the voltages of the cpu and ram ect, so its undervolted a bit, and consumes very little power. Yet its performance is just wonderful. I have always loved PFSENSE.. it is great as well for traffic shaping.. When the kid has been playing on his computer a little too long, I can get in and start to get him to lag out ever so slightly. Where he can still play but gets a little frustrated and starts doing something more productive.... It is worth it for that alone lol.
@@wishusknight3009 I need to understand a little more about shaping - I'm looking to do that for the 4G WAN failover port and reduce download traffic to about 20Mbps and upload to about 2Mbps - reason being that the SIM is a prepayment with 25GB allowance and a 2 year expiry so only want it to be there for when it needs to be used. I also need to see if I can stop the dpinger process constantly pinging the 4G network when it's not required.
I just spent half a day researching firewalls for my home network and I found Tom's channel and he's very informative. I was debating on purchasing a Netgate SG1100 with pfSense and now that I see Tom on your channel it made my decision even easier! Thanks guys!
I love these kinds of videos. Although I have my own network setup but having videos where you have two big network youtubers having a real conversations without it being prescripted is refreshing.
@@davidbombal You’re a legend David. You give so much back to the community and help out so many people in need, it’s just admirable and inspirational. Wish you all the best 🙏🏻
I use it extensively. Primarily to control access to the management network, but also to protect guest networks and add a secondary control to VPN systems. Been using since 2011. It's great!
Stumbled upon this video after a few weeks of networking research (for setting up networking in my home). I'm a web developer who's dabbled in the business side of things as well and there's a ton of fantastic advice in your video here; thanks for much to the both of you for sharing!
I bought the Netgate SG 3100 several years ago as my edge firewall, router, etc and I absolutely love it. This is coming from a 17 year network engineering veteran that is defintiely a Cisco guy.
We use open source in the military. In one embarrassing moment I had to explain to an officer that his "new top secret battalion level chat room" was in fact just mIRC on a laptop and some of us had been using it since we were 14 years old.
I'm happy that you and Tom has had a time to conversation and sharing knowledge about firewalls. I hope there would be more videos between the two of you sharing your knowledge :)
2nd comment sorry for littering... The sg6100 specifically- talk about hardened firewall out of the box... look what you got to go through to get a multiple clients on a lan party... cod anyone ? Nat on strict Compared to a udm pro out of the... nat = moderate Compared to majority of retail routers that have pnp enabled by default... nat = open This is why netgate will remain profitable until the pace of which end users start to understand how to properly config their unique configuration into that puppy... I suggest start off with buying a netgate device... the smallest device that you can afford that does not have a logical chip... all interfaces should be seperate... no vlan witchcraft .... Then build your own... fun to see it ALL come to life... Thanks Tom. Your informative in invaluable 🙏
I was using DD-WRT on my Linksys router before I found IPCop. OpenVPN on IPCop was easy as pie. Then I tried Monowall before it got forked to pfSense. So been using pfSense since 2008.
First time hearing about PFSense and already plotting how to deploy this... Thank you David for the interview... and Tom is a true salesman, definitely going to build a sales skill as advised by Tom.
Great job on asking what feature he is not recommending to use in pfsense. All the positive stuff you find on a flyer but the negative things are the ones you can only get from someone that has experience with the product.
Really like your insightful podcast videos on your channel David. Questions you've asked are really helpful especially to younger audience. Much appreciate to Tom who is open (not just open-source) and honest in sharing his opinion. Keep making more collabs like this with insightful questions!
I’ve been using pfSense for years and love it. There are four issues IMO that we're not covered in this video. 1) The lack of a good interface for inbound rules. Each interface has a page for outbound rules. This becomes an issue when controlling traffic between VLANs. You can use the floating tab to control inbound rules, but that’s one tab with rules for all interfaces. It’s really a bad design and makes understanding your rules and where and how they are applied confusing. Each interface should have an inbound and outbound rule page. I will use pfctl to look at rules for each interface to see exactly what's being filtered on each interface. However, since pfSense is designed t be operated via a web interface, there should be a clear way to see all rules via that interface. 2) There are several NAT limitations. The Port Forward NAT section has limitations, but should be as flexible as Outbound NAT. Also, there is no support for double NAT. I think Cisco calls this twice NAT. i.e. The ability to modify source IP and/or port on incoming packets and the ability to modify destination IP and/or port on outgoing packets. I can't recall if this is a limitation of pf or not, but it is useful in some situations. Cisco added "twice NAT" to ASAs around 8 years ago I believe. 3) The lack of a cli like you’d find in an SRX or VyOS. I get that not everyone is comfortable with a cli and new users probably just want a web interface, but if setting up bonded ports for wan and/or lan, you have to set up pfSense one way using their console cli, then get into the web GUI and then change everything to bond the ports. It can be a cumbersome process and one small mistake and you have to start over. There are other advantages of a cli like quickly being able to see a full config for something vs multiple pages in a web interface, easily copying config, making a few changes and applying it to the same or another device. 3) One more issue with pfSense is the limit of one IPsec VPN setup for remote users. We use OpenVPN to get around it, but back in the day some things had to be IPsec and not being able to have multiple setups for remote users were some users can access limited stuff and others can access more or everything was an issue. I have’t tried this in years, so things may have improved. Again OpenVPN works great for this provided your requirements don’t negate its use.
I went to OPNSense after Netgate was in denial on leaking (my) personal data on their (old) forum. As they were not serious about securing their forum, I extended that observation to their products.
Im a huge fan of pfSense. For many years...even today many off the shelf solutions weren't optimized for bidirectional 1 Gbps throughput much less multigig. The ones that were cost thousands of dollars in hardware and licensing cost. Now ATT is offering 5 Gbps throughput to regular people. I can't think of any other solution other than pfSense that would be able to provide that much throughput.
Been running pfsens on vmware at home since I was a student ~20yrs ago, and since having lots of projects using it, no matter big or small, from the cloud, DC to on-perm. Learn a lot from them and pfsense never let me down :D
David and Tom, this was a very useful video. I think the title of the video is underwhelming, because when I first saw the title, and that the video was 56 minutes long, I thought that there was no way that there could be a 56 minute discussion about pfSense. But the second half of this video was highly valuable for everyone in IT, especially for people who want to broaden their role in it, or to change careers to IT.
I was confused about firewall which one should I bay Cisco firepower or fortigate.. ets, This is a great conversation, Best video that I've seen, you've been answered a lot of questions, Thanks a lot.
Pfsense is super good .As a network engineer , I primarily work on cisco equipment, barracuda ngf + wafs and fortigates. But I have used pfsense in a few businesses.
You are both amazing people sharing your knowledge, I think that’s what it’s all about, lots of respect, have been watching Tom’s vids for years fantastic!
I started in pf sense as recommended by a friend, after all my issues with commercially available Home network Routers. I started with the Netgate SG-1100 this unit failed so I returned it. In its place I obtained a Netgate 2100 which is so much better in every way. I acquired a book Safer @ Home with pfsense which I am still working my way through. I have watched many videos from Lawrence Systems. I will say my entire Home network has been much more stable since using the pfsense box. I went down the route of ASUS, D-Link, Netgate, Bitdefender Routers, I have a Cyber intrusion which syphoned off 7 Tb of Data and my ISP was going to charge me for the data overage. This was the beginning of the journey to make safe the Home Network System.
Tom has helped me no end! Started with Freenas 9, Now on Scale with Pfsense & Cloudflare... It's been emotional at times! Would never of made it without Tom's help. Although I still can't get HA PROXY to work!! lol X
Awesome video David! I appreciate Tom and you having this conversation. Very interesting and I enjoyed it. Thanks for all the videos you do. And to Tom as well. Great guys to learn from.
Am looking into pfsense. Loved this video discussion to get a general sense of this software. Also great advice on developing sales skills, as this will help sell your business OR sell your solutions internally for getting the budget to actually implement it.
PFSense is a greatway to learn a lot about firewall, as well infact networking in general, I've got my firewall (PFsense) running on a VM and it works great.
I would really like to see something fleshed out as well as pfsense with turnkey hardware solutions, but on linux. The big reasons for me would be #1: vastly better hardware support #2: In-kernel wireguard #3: more flexibility and performance, nf/ip/x tables better scaling, etc
I've used OpenBSD as my firewall at home for years without any problems. The only problem is that it's not very good at Wi-Fi so the speeds would be low if I used it for that. Fortunately, I have an old router I can use for that. It works well for us.
For the BGP issue and other similar issues, you should have an out of band private network connected to terminal servers with secure bastion hosts connected to the private network and internet from one or more 3rd party carriers so you can reach the network devices in major outage situations or something equivalent to this kind of setup. This is the problem with products like Unify for enterprise as they have no console, no out of band options, etc. Regardless of what you use, you should have a sensible disaster recovery plan appropriately designed for what you have deployed and should be prepared to execute that plan.
I've been virtualizing my pfsense firewall on a 4-node proxmox cluster along with numerous other VM's for several years now. The cluster is made from ivy bridge generation supermicro fat-twins. All VM data is backed by ceph. I use it for actual workloads and lots of training and experimentation for work.
Thank you for this amazing interview. I work in an IT servicing company in Germany. My boss says that he needs the cut we charge on selling hardware. Of course, it is hard to compete with the internet. Tom said that he lets the customer buy it wherever they want. Is he increasing the labour fee in these cases?
I got Pfsense to work with Hyper-V as well. I was pretty happy with it but I moved over to hardware because my Microsoft server takes so long to update each month.
First off nice video I enjoy it. I've used pfsense once in a business environment and my IPsec VPN kept dropping. My other endpoint was a Cisco ASA. The ASAs I've deployed have been rock solid. I will say pfsense is easier to setup works great at home.
Context matters. Had I known about pfsense 10 years ago I would have deployed if in a heartbeat. Fit the bill perfectly. When your one of 200 companies owned by a fortune 200 you use the equipment corporate wants.
Pfsense is great to work with, I set up a company a while back with a pre made box - but also for the cost of a network card built a back up machine that would plug and play if the pre made machine ever failed (they had an old PC they were not using - so for about an hour of my time I built the back up box) That is some very affordable redundency!
I liked your interview one thing i have learned always be open to listing to people that have been out in field list to there experiences and never get a big head and put people down to make your self feel good no one is all knowing always be open one size does not fit every thing be felexable
Hey Lawrence we are from Battle Creek and have worked with that Detroit large medical conglomerate too. They ended up selling the BC facility so we have not worked with them for a few years.
I run 5 smaller casinos ($100m Rev) off pfsense, been bulletproof for the last 6 years. Run them on our VMware clusters. I know other casinos are paying over $15K a year in Forti subscriptions. We use ipsec, pfblocker, snort, and openvpn.
I have used pfsense as a primary firewall for 75 user for the last company i worked for .It worked 11.5 years with out any issue. Behind our firewall there was fileserver and exchange server . but I suggest to get support if things get into problem you can recover in less down time. in 11.5 years I never took support.
I was really surprised how easy it was to set up pfsense. I just reused my old pc, an intel skylake pc with 24gb of ram , pretty overkill but it's what i had!
The main difference between an expert and a novice is not that an expert doesn’t make mistakes, but that an expert knows how to recover from the mistake without panicking.
I completely agree with what you're saying about BSD does it first and Linux does it better. It's a shame that pfsense is only able to be compiled (by a normal user) for the x86_64 architecture. When something like OpenWRT (which is Linux-based) is able to be compiled for arm32, arm64, MIPS, MIPS64, PPC, x86, and x86_64. I mean, you can run OpenWRT on a Raspberry PI no problem. It sucks that overall platform + hardware support is so limited with pfsense. Hopefully, that will change in the future. OpenWRT could definitely use the competition. I'm a firm believer that "competition breeds innovation".
I use pfsense for home! I love it, switching back to my home router after my pfsense box went down, really sucked, my gf hated pfblockerng, now she doesnt mind it. The traffic is routed so efficiently. I set it up originally in 2018
We use pfsense in our bussines since years, easy to set up and to maintain, need low resources, netgate products are good and cheap. Is fantastic when virtualized on modern and low power hardware (N95-N100) for small integate solution for mobility. VPN management is very good and quite fast if you have decent hardware.
David and Tom, thank you so much for this interview, you're both some of my best guys, I also use opensource solution for security and VoIP, for security I do use pfSense, and most of the configs I've done through Tom's videos. David Bombal my master, I've enrolled in couple of his udemy videos and it always help at some moment in tech life.
Good talk. About the so called shortage of technical talent / experience, let me know. Almost 30 years of IT, I only see companies hiring newbies and working with high level paperware profiles. It's actually dangerous to be technically competent, especially in cybersecurity.
I loved the Firepower question… I worked for a company that just pushed everything Cisco and Firepower is such hot garbage.. the amount of companies that paid me to install it.. then paid me to rip it out (EVEN THOUGH I TOLD THEM NOT TO USE IT MULTIPLE TIMES!!!) is mind blowing…
David I’ve absolutely been loving some of your conversations. Are you active on any podcast platforms? If not I think it would be awesome if you uploaded some of these talks as podcasts, I work in a place where I can easily listen but RU-vid drains battery really quickly. I’m sure some fans who use apple podcast or Spotify may find it more convenient sometimes, just a suggestion and thanks for the awesome content.
Correction on Tom's statement that there aren't many firewalls that do TLS 1.3 decryption: All major firewall vendors do in fact support this. That information is very outdated.
The Major Firewall vendors also do cost a major amount more than the the pfSense. If TLS 1.3 is a requirement, you can better look somewhere else. Anyway it's tricky. Banks etc trying to keep you out the encrypted connection and Firewall vendors need continuously to work to keep themselves in
@@alfabètagamma-k7p nah, you can get affordable option that don't cost much more than a pfSense+Netgate+Snort-Subscription. Take Sophos XG firewalls, as an example. I work with SSL decryption on a daily basis, it isn't even half as complicated as people say it is. Sometimes connections can't be established due to certificate pinning, but that isn't an issue, you just exclude them (with a whitelist). When you start using it, you have to do a bit of fine-tuning, but once that's dialed in, you don't have to deal with it much anymore. It gives you so much better security, it's well worth the little bit of effort.
David, make video on "How to choose laptop which has pre-built wifi adapter which is suitable for hacking and where we get monitor mode, packet siffing and more" Consequently, make video on laptop that is suitable for hacking
I don't see SSL traffic inspection as a specialist requirement these days. When 2/3rds of modern day traffic is encrypted, pretty much everyone requires dpi these days. Also, ngfw's include dpi as a STD function.
Old video but... I need a home firewall that: 1) 1.4gb throughput after full security inspection (minimum), 2) runs in transparent mode (I do not want to re-IP the home and lab), 3) is SIMPLE to configure and use for a non-network knowledgeable person. I have used a Palo Alto PA-2xx in the past and they were amazingly simple to use, but did not have the throughput with inspection I wanted. I am not a network guy and do not want to be one. I just want something that is super simple to setup and forget about. Thoughts?
Hello David. Can you please share information how you recorded this interview, the quality is so high it seems like you guys were recording it locally but also running a meeting at the same time. Could you please share how did you do that?
Thanks for a great show, wish I was 20 again😎 now I have an extra 40+ years, but there's always something to learn. Tomorrow I will have to setup a pfsense lab for my home/office.
100% right. Ubuntu Pro extended support for $300, why would you not. At some point if you want them to stick around the choice to pay people will come up
A question non-relevant,if i want to do a become a pentester it's better that i study(or even take)for the A+,network+,security+,or i go all in with ejpt,or pentest+,OSCP...?
well i watched some videos about pfsense, but sadly not even yours were able to solve my simple problem. i had 2 game servers in my network, the rules/firewall was configured like the old one, but pfsense did not allow any connect through it. i tried for 1 week, got some support from someone, who had it in his network without any success too. as i said we tried by re-installing, reconfiguring etc. pfsense was the first firewall, which blocked my 2 servers. the servers were visible in the outside world, but that was it, noone was able to connect to it. a cheap linksys router / firewall, i set the port forwardings, save, everything was fine and worked without a problem. so i sent back the hardware and removed the firewall from my network. the hardware was not the issue, it was pfsense. so from my point of view, pfsense is not what you and many others proclaimed in their videos. it did not work for me, sorry.
I went from using Win ME(don't judge me it had a easy to do networking wizard) as a router/firewall to using openbsd to using pfsense after my distant cousin told me about it... although I feel a bit self disappointment for not keeping on with using OpenBSD to this day, PFSense has been nice:)
David great interview with Tom. Love his reviews of products, saved me much time and effort. Also have encouraged prospects to view his how to s. Tom and I have similar views similar and the value proposition open source. Again great job.
