Pfsense Stability question
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Hello,
I was wondering how stable PFsense firewall is? Does it even crash? also I was under the impression that it was like iptables so If I do a command such as :
iptables -L -n I would get all firewall rules.
Kind Regards
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In my experience, it's as stable as any firewall I've ever used, and I've used a few. You may find that 'instability' could occur if you installed any packages which might cause issues, but otherwise the core system is pretty much sound. I've been running PFS at my office for several years now and never had any major issue.
IPTables is a Linux firewall. BSD uses 'pf'. If you want to see your firewall rules from a command-line, type 'pfctl -s rules'. Here's a link to a tutorial, though you can find plenty of these through your friend Google:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html
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Another good source of info is the FreeBSD manual pages.
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pfctl&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+10.3-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html
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I have yet to see PFSense crash in the 2 years that I've been using it. I have also not had Window crash in the past 8 years, which includes Vista, 7, 8.1, and now 10, and I regularly put several months of uptime before rebooting for belated patch Tuesdays.
You can make any system crash if you have strange configurations or use uncommon hardware. Most complaints about PFSense stability is bad hardware, uncommon hardware, or "I installed a bunch of packages with very specific requirements that no one else uses".