PC-BSD and pfSense books

Authored by pfSense co-founder Chris Buechler and pfSense developer Jim Pingle, The Definitive Guide to pfSense covers installation and basic configuration through advanced networking and firewalling of the popular open source firewall and router distribution.

This book is designed to be a friendly step-by-step guide to common networking and security tasks, plus a thorough reference of pfSense’s capabilities. The Definitive Guide to pfSense covers the following topics:

• An introduction to pfSense and its features.
• Hardware and system planning.
• Installing and upgrading pfSense.
• Using the web-based configuration interface.
• Backup and restoration.
• Firewalling fundamentals and defining and troubleshooting rules.
• Port forwarding and Network Address Translation.
• General networking and routing configuration.
• Bridging, Virtual LANs (VLANs), and Multi-WAN.
• Virtual Private Networks using IPsec, PPTP, and OpenVPN.
• Traffic shaping and load balancing.
• Wireless networking and captive portal setups.
• Redundant firewalls and High Availability.
• Various network related services.
• System monitoring, logging, traffic analysis, sniffing, packet capturing, and troubleshooting.
• Software package and third-party software installations and upgrades.

The first review of the book is out now.

Congratulations to pfSense for their 5 year anniversary.

Dru Lavigne is currently working on a book on PC-BSD: Definitive Guide to PC-BSD

I’m about 2/3 of the way through book #3 on BSD, tentatively titled “The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD”. This book will be through Apress, and I’m excited that it will include a live DVD of PC-BSD 8.0 so you can follow along as you read it. The book is designed for users new to BSD up to existing PC-BSD/FreeBSD power users. Think of it as the type of book new users can grow into while existing users can still find nuggets of “I didn’t know that”. I’ve also concentrated on the importance of community–a concept new users aren’t used to and most tech books never mention.

Here is the Table of Contents:

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4. m0n0wall beta 12 and FreeBSD 7.0 based pfSense
5. m0n0wall vs pfSense; similarities & differences