You have been running pfSense on your network. Since there is no high availability on your WAN side, you now have decided to add another ISP for redundancy. When the primary goes down, the secondary ISP should take over or use both the primary and secondary link simultaneously like a load balancing method. Is it possible in pfSense? The multi …
We configured the OpenVPN with pfSense in our last blog post, and I also showed you how you could connect your Windows 10 machine to the pfSense OpenVPN network. Everything worked fine, and now, we will access the OpenVPN via the internet on an IOS device. I am using an iPad for this testing, and the steps mentioned here are …
The most frustrating part of working with the virtual lab is that sometimes things don’t work the way you expected them. At times when I work with virtual network equipment, certain features don’t work at all. Mostly, I tend to believe that it is a bug on the software, and when your friends or colleagues tell you that they were …
The Opnsense is a free, open-source firewall that you could use on your home or small enterprise networks. It does the job really well; unlike pfSense, Opnsense is entirely open-source. When you want to test this opnsense firewall, the best option is to build a lab with it or replace it with your home router. In the last article, we …
The pfSense is an open-source and free firewall that you can spin up on your home network. I have been using it for a while, and it works great. Also, it is a very stable firewall that you could use. Some enterprise users use pfSense as their primary firewall. However, for enterprise networks, it is better to use official pfSense …
In some of my last blogs, I wrote about installing virtual machines on different hypervisors such as KVM, VMware, VirtualBox, etc. I use the windows machine as a daily driver Virtual Machine on my Ubuntu host; having the choice of both operating systems at a time is excellent. And I can switch between them any time I want. Can you …
As a network engineer, most of the issues you may have to deal with are related to the performance of a network. There are multiple tools that we can use to troubleshoot performance issues. One among them is the iPerf, which can help you identify a given link bandwidth capacity. You can have a server sitting on a remote location, …
You wanted to test something in the windows server operating system; maybe you want to create a domain controller, a DHCP server, or even a DNS server. The best way to test the windows server configuration is to perform them on a LAB environment. And Some of you may not have lab access, so your available option would be to …
The Oracle VirtualBox is one of the popular hypervisor used by many. It is open-source and free; hence it is widely used by many users. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. So it doesn’t matter what operating system you are using; you can install the VirtualBox and spin up a VM’s on it. I have personally used multiple …
Port forwarding is the best way to allow external users to the internal network in the networking technology. And the port forwarding in the VMware workstation is not so different. Instead of allowing the external users on the internet, the VMware workstation allows external users on the local network to the specific port you mentioned on the Virtual machine. You …
When you have a VirtualBox hypervisor installed, there is no doubt that the easiest way to navigate through the VirtualBox is via GUI. It is very user-friendly; even an average user can create and manage a virtual machine using VirtualBox GUI without having prior knowledge on how to manage VM’s. But the fastest way to use the VirtualBox is via …
Ubuntu is the alternate Linux operating system that I use in VirtualBox hypervisor on my windows 10 host machine. Because of which I can switch between the Ubuntu guest and windows host anytime I want. One important thing when you work with Linux VM in VirtualBox, how do I transfer files between the operating system and what is the simplest …
Port forwarding is a network concept where we allow external users to access some of the network resources located internally. We have covered multiple blogs on how you can configure port forwarding on pfSense and Opnsense firewall. In this blog, we will look at how to configure port forwarding in VirtualBox using the NAT interface. What is port forwarding in …
When you think about running a Virtual Machine for a lab or testing something out, the first option that will come to your mind would be the VirtualBox. The Oracle VirtualBox is a free open source virtualization platform developed and maintained by the oracle corporation. It is still my free go-to solution when I wanted to spin up some VM’s for …
Ever since Ubuntu changed its network configuration utility to netplan from the traditional configuration, many of them got so upset. Some of them are very annoyed that they even entirely removed the netplan and installed ifupdown back into the system. So is Ubuntu Netplan going to stay ?, if yes shouldn’t we learn how to configure them on our Ubuntu …
In some of my last blog posts, we covered the installation of pfSense on BareMetal, meaning on old physical PC, and different hypervisors such as pfSense on KVM, VMware workstation, and so on. In this blog, we will cover how you can install pfSense on a virtual box hypervisor. Since Oracle VirtualBox is free and supports Windows, MAC, and Linux …
In the last blog, we have configured Opnsense on VirtualBox, in this blog we are going to take a look at how we can configure port forwarding with Opnsense firewall. As you know, the Opnsense firewall would block any connections that come from the external/public internet. And we can use Opnsense port forwarding to allow certain ports from the external …
Your public IP address is: What is this public IP? Public or external IP addresses are those addresses that are routed on the internet. It can be IPv4 or IPv6. And it is a unique address assigned by the internet service providers. And most internet users are connected behind a single public IP address except for some enterprise users who …
If you think about an open-source firewall, the first two names that come to your mind would be Opnsense and PfSense firewalls. I have installed pfSense on my old machine, and I am still using it. It works great. When I first heard about the Opnsense firewall, I thought, let me spin them up in my old machine, replacing the …
PfSense is great for small offices and even for some of the enterprise networks and most importantly it is a piece of budget-friendly network equipment. If you wanted dedicated hardware and support for your business, you have that option too. You could get Netgate hardware and their paid support or You can even go for a free option which is …
In The last few blogs, we have built a small lab using the Paloalto firewall in gns3, connected the firewall to the internet, and allowed the internal users to the internet. In this blog, we are going to set up and configure a Global protect VPN on a Palo alto firewall and allow remote users to access the internal resources …
Port forwarding is one of the features that is useful if you wanted to allow the external users to specific ports on the LAN side or inside the network. And many people get confused when it comes to the port forwarding configuration on the firewall. In this blog, we are going to configure the port forwarding feature using the pfSense …
GNS3 software is great. You can build most of the network labs and POC’s with it. I even build an SD-WAN lab in it. However, the problem is that it is based on opensource software, so you will get some issues here and there when you start to use it. Like any other open-source projects, you have GNS3 community forums …
When you want to extend your network with 3rd party vendors the best way to do that is by configuring an IPsec tunnel towards the third-party devices. The challenge however, most of the remote ends may not have the same equipment as you have. Let’s say, for example, you may have a cisco router as your edge router that connects …
In some of the last blog I have covered how to create IPsec tunnels between different firewalls, however, those who want to learn more about the IPsec VPN should practice them on a Cisco router. In my opinion, if you can set up an IPsec tunnel on a Cisco router it would be a very easy task for other vendors. …
Have you ever connected to a VPN and realize that you cannot access some of the network resources that you have at home? Maybe you are not able to access Printer in your local network, or something else. And other situation is you have a windows machine that is connected to two different networks and you Are not able to …
Ubuntu is one of my favorite Linux distros, but I love windows 10 as well. I used one of my windows machines as my main operating system, as I also needed Ubuntu. I used to virtualize Ubuntu on a VMware workstation. It was going well until I decided to use GNS3 on my windows machine. I was using GNS3 with …
In Linux mint the ssh service is not enabled by default, you need to enable the service manually. In this blog, we are going to enable ssh service on the Linux mint and to secure the access we will go ahead and change the default port and also allow specific users to the ssh service. What does SSH stand for …
Most of the home networks nowadays use Wi-Fi, and we rarely get to see the wired connection directly to the machine. By default, when you connect to both the Wi-Fi and the ethernet cable, the windows machine would priorities the ethernet connection over the wifi.However, if you check the routing table, you should see two default routes, one with a …
If you have a Linux machine (Ubuntu, Centos, Redhat) running in your environment and you would want to configure them as an NTP server it is pretty easy. In our last blog, we took a look at what is NTP and how to configure the public and private NTP servers using network routers. In this blog, we are going to …
