pfSensee: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide to the pfSense Open Source Firewall and Router Distribution 1st Edition

This is a really well written and organized book. It is much thicker than it appears in the product description. The book also covers a lot of basic networking which could probably have been skipped but is a nice addition and makes the book complete. I have not read the book cover-to-cover but have been skipping around chapters. pfSense is written in a very nice conversational style that makes it easy to read but still gets to the point of the section. It is a technical book you *could* read cover-to-cover.The book contains a lot of comprehensive information about pfsense and also contains some journeyman information and practical experience about different hardware situations and implementations of pfsense features. In short, it is clear that the authors work with pfSense and are very familiar with it.pfSense reminds me of the manuals you used to get with new hardware - they were complete and also instructive on different usage scenarios without being completely dry. This book could have been called "pfSense, the missing manual". I hope the publisher and authors will consider updating the book when it starts to get out of sync with the releases of pfSense in the future.The whole pfSense community can be proud of this book, it should really help with marketing of the project and building acceptance of the pfSense project. If you are using or learning pfSense and would like a paper-based reference this book would be perfect.

If you're using, or contemplating a PfSense firewall, you'll want to read up on how to best implement it. The PF stands for Packet Filtering, and PfSense is an incredible product, by the way. It's much more than a firewall- although it is a fantastic, highly configurable firewall. And there's a very active forum- so when help is needed, there are plenty of resources. But the book is definitive, and the place to start. It's simple to follow, well written, gives clear examples, and makes suggestions when there are multiple ways to meet an objective. We've been using PfSense in our data centers for several years, and can't imagine changing anything. This book, along with the public support forum, have helped us immensely. Highly recommended.

pfSense is a great piece of software; I've been using it for my small company (30 employees) as our firewall, DHCP server, and VPN endpoint for at least two years. It is a very flexible system with LOTS of features that often provide more options than I need or even know how to use. That's where this book comes in.Chris Buechler is one of the co-founders of pfSense, and he clearly knows his product. The topics covered in the book are, for the most part, covered in exquisite step-by-step detail with screen prints along the way. You can start with rudimentary knowledge of networks and firewalls and, with this book's guidance, install and configure an impressive array of capabilities with pfSense.The particular reason I bought the book -- details on how to set up fail-over on a multi-wan without load balancing -- turned out to be a bit of a weakness. The two topics, fail-over and load balancing, are discussed simultaneously and the usual "step-by-step with pictures" approach wasn't used for each topic on its own. As a result, my particular question wasn't very well answered (However I did find what I needed [...]There is a wealth of information about pfSense available on the web, and if you are diligent you can get all of the information in the book and more through serious Googling. However, I really do recommend this book -- it's nice to have a hard-copy, indexed set of data while you're messing with your connection to the outside world; there's nothing worse than messing up your firewall and realizing that your source of "what next" is on the web...which you just disconnected. Further, because pfSense is free to use and open-source, book sales are one of the few ways that Mr. Buechler and his team are able to support the very worthy project.If you use pfSense you owe it to yourself to buy this book. It is a great reference and also a wonderful way to support the project.

I've been using pfSense for two years in a business environment and have been eagerly awaiting the release of this book. As with many open-source projects, my knowledge of pfSense has come primarily from first-hand experience and gleaning from other users experiences in forums. While this has certain advantages, it can't compare to a formal, organized breakdown of the product by people in the know and this guide delivers. I have had time to peruse the content and read in depth into several issues for which I could not find answers elsewhere. The discussion of various aspects of the platform goes beyond the simple setup model of other IT guides and actually discusses underlying dynamics, issues and their sources, and best practices beyond the vanilla setup. The writing is reasonable, even, and understandable. If you are using pfSense, this is an indispensable resource. I wish that I had access to this years ago as it would have saved numerous hours of development time.

This version is a good book for Version 1.6 of pfSense. However they are working on 2.0Its a very good book but you will have to hunt a lot to make changes in 2.0 when it refers to it in the previous version. Still a very useful book.I ended up getting the gold edition of pfSense and got a draft copy of 2.0 book. Which is more relevant to what you need to do in pfSense.pfSense is one of the best firewall / intrusion detection systems I have ever used. I use it for my VPN / Edge Router. It works great, and super stable. It ran on an AMD 1.4ghz Thunderbird (circa 2000) with 1 gb of ram with absolutely NO problems. Make sure you got a good network card (intel not the realtek chipset - even though realtek works) and go to town.

Buen libro para entender de manera global las posibilidades de uso del pfsense. Como nota negativa, algo desactualizado. Se agradecería más detalle sobre configuraciones de paquetes instalables. Servicios tipo suricata, snort, pfblocker, squidguard...

Provides you with a solid foundation for understanding the power of pfSense.

Livro de grande valia na configuração e entendimento do produto, altamente recomendável, pois mostra conceitos das tecnologias envolvidas e como aplica-las corretamente.

Not that much descriptive as expected. Can be very clear with screen shot examples.All as per the help files in pfsense website

Veramente una guida all'uso del sistema pfSense, spiega in modo semplice e pieno di "trucchi" per l'uso.Questo libro richiede ovviamente una conoscenza delle reti anche superficiale, anche se nelle prime 15 pagine riprende i concetti base.