Pfsense as a file backup device
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Maybe the pfsense firewall can also handle the task of scanning the LAN for shared files and copying them periodically to a huge external USB drive? Notice I am NOT talking about a file server, but a rudimentary file copier.
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Sure you could do that with simple script and cron..
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This something new to me, how do you do the freebsd equivalent of "copy \mypc\data* d:\today"
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well you would have to install smb on it unless your servers you doing the copy from support say scp, ftp, nfs that you could just mount.
I would would not suggest installing samba on your firewall..
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Of the network file systems available by default on pfsense, which would perform best over 100base ethernet to copy from windows xp and ubuntu?
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Is rsync available on pfsense?
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This is an exceptionally bad idea.
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Why? Windows machines can be excluded from the backup. Then it is just an NFS mount command, a USB drive mount command, and a cron command in the script. If you can't trust pfsense to do this on the LAN side, you might as well not trust it as a firewall against hackers from the WAN side.
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However, best security practices say the firewall computer should be dedicated solely to act as a firewall (this reduces the chances of the firewall being compromised), and practically speaking, this would impair the firewall's performance.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/solutionbase-strengthen-network-defenses-by-using-a-dmz/
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How do you backup computers in the DMZ zone then, like web servers. All the computers I want to back up are for web browsing, emails and p2p filesharing. So they should be in same zone, the DMZ zone.
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By the way, copying to the backup can be done with ionice set to maximum niceness and nice set to maximum niceness too so it will hardly be noticeable. If that's not enough, a script can be made to pause the copying if traffic is detected.