[K12OSN] OT: Firewall solution suggestion

Barry Cisna brcisna at eazylivin.net
Sat Jan 15 15:43:25 UTC 2011


Hello All,

This topic does not pertain to K12LTSP per see but I think it may do
some users of K12LTSP some good if they do not know about this firewall,
pfSense.
We are a k-12 school district. We have been using a Linux based firewall
commercial product for the last 9 years which has worked great. But as
time marches on the  neccessity to have two WAN connections this product
simply did not offer a transparent failover as well as load balancing
if one wan went down. We are a rural school so without a doubt we do
have one of our two wans go down from time to time.

Enter pfSense. I installed pfSense on three offcast 1u servers we
had,and these have worked great for the last year. It provides Ipsec
Open and pptp vpns and many other niceities. 
This is going to save our school about $7500 per year not having to have
a contract for our previous firewall solution. But more of a savings is
not having to roll a van to two remote buildings to switch wires to the
second WAN. I tried reading several solutions using a conventional Linux
firewall with some scripting to make a downed wan link fail over to the
second wan but simply could not make it work transparently.
If you have multiple wan connections this may be worth looking into for
you. I know Cisco of course does have this same capability if you are
willing to spend the $$$!.
Can't beat the price AND reliability of pfSense from what I have
learned,though. pfSense runs on FreeBSD and is about a 68mb iso FWIW.
Hope this may help someone else here.

Take Care,
BC






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