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 …
Networking
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 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 in VMware workstation, most of the configuration works without any issues, however, certain features don’t work at all. Mostly, I tend to believe that it …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
As you know if you wanted to get hands-on and practice the Palo alto firewalls, the best place is to virtualize them. As many of you out there may not have the options to set up a physical lab. However, there are alternate ways to spin up the Palo alto lab in the cloud using …
In a big network environment where you have hundreds or even thousands of devices connected, anything can go wrong at any point in time. So as a network or system engineer it’s your responsibility to make sure that all the systems are up and working at all times. In case anything goes wrong you need …
In our last blog, we took a look at how you can set up a pfSense firewall on an old computer. The problem with that setup is, it had only a single 100Mb NIC which means I had to split the interface into the VLANs. So I can have the WAN and LAN separately. It …
In the last blog, we have spun up a pfSense firewall in KVM and made it work as a consumer router replacement. Though it worked fine, the performance was not so great. Hence, I decided to build an old spare laptop to work as a pfSense firewall. And when you convert your old pc to …
The Pfsense firewall is a good alternative for your home network router. It can even replace the high-end commercial routers at the enterprise network as well. Moreover, it is open source and free too. Unless you are opting for support from netgate. Can I install pfSense on Ubuntu? Pfsense is an open-source firewall based on …
In a world where everything connected over the internet, it is quite common that we get to see many enterprise users connect the branch offices via the IPsec VPN. Moreover, the internet connection is getting cheaper and cheaper now as compared to the dedicated links. That is one of the reasons too the SD-WAN is …
You have got the brand new Paloalto firewall installed, and you wanted to know how you can set up an IPsec tunnel between branches using the Paloalto firewall. If I were to configure an IPSec tunnel for the first time, I would configure them in my lab before I configure it in the production. That …
How does DHCP work in the network? Before we answer that question, we need to understand the different ways of configuring the IP addresses.You could use either DHCP or static IP configuration. You might already know the configuration of IP address statically on a computer. It requires you to go to the network properties of …
If you wanted to connect two sites over the internet securely, the very popular method is to use the IPsec site to site VPN. By default, the IP alone doesn’t provide security, so we need to wrap the IP packet with IPsec to encrypt the traffic inside the IP. Once the IPsec connection is established …
If you are new to networking you must have heard the term called ARP protocol – address resolution protocol many times.You may be wondering or even confused. Well, what is the ARP protocol and how ARP works in the real world? Before we talk about how arp works we need to know something called a …
I have worked on multiple firewalls; however, the one firewall that stands out from the crowd is the Pfsense firewall. Let’s take a look at what makes the Pfsense different from other firewalls, and then we will also see how you can install a Pfsense firewall on GNS3 software and start building a basic LAB. …
If you’re using Ubuntu Dekstop or server, and one day you decided to change the IP address of your ubuntu machine from automatic (DHCP) to static configuration. how do you achieve that? If you are using Ubuntu with GUI, it is pretty straightforward, but what if you don’t have GUI and the only option that …
I have seen some of my friends and colleagues who are struggling to get their GNS3 up and running with no issues at all. Sometime they call me and say, Saif can you please take a look, it is not working! The problem with GNS3 is that after you get everything working and the next …