Background knowledge required to use pfsense?
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Hi,
I've recently been told that pfsense is a good tool to use to manage a network and its routing/firewalling etc. I have never used it before and my freebsd/linux knowledge is almost non-existant. How much of freebsd do I need to know before I can even consider using pfsense? Can I get away by just diving into pfsense right away?
The kind of things I would like to have set up is load-balancing using multiple adsl modems (or as a start just simultaneous dialup pppoe connections using a single modem), routing, dhcp server, sending all traffic from certain IP ranges through a certain dial-up connection and some other stuff I cant think of right away. Perhaps I should just camp on the forum and start with the simple stuff?
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Don't worry!
Unless you want to dive under the hood no OS knowledge is needed. All configuration stuff is done in the webGUI and shouldn't even be done in the file system.
If you have a spare machine to test pfSense on you can d/l a live CD. Boot it, configure the interface(s) and access it from a host on the same subnet. Unless you actually install pfSense on that machine (doable with the same Live CD) no changes to a previously installed OS will be made!
