A common question we get all the time is, which pfSense hardware should I buy to run my firewall on? In this Ultimate pfSense Hardware Guide for 2022, we cover this very question.

Part of pfSense’s popularity is the huge fanbase and community around it. The values to be filled in are read by the script from the creds.yaml file, which is read from disk the data is then stored as a username and password accessible in the creds dictionary ( Figure 7).The pfSense firewall is the most used Open Source firewall available today. The selenium module is often used for testing WebGUIs and makes it really easy to simulate a user sitting in front of a web user interface.Īfter the pfSense login screen, the pfSense dashboard page ( Figure 6) with the firewall overview data is saved in the saved.png file by the new screen scraper by calling save_screenshot() as a trigger. The script opens the browser, takes you to the login page, autofills the form fields, and then clicks on the Login button. You need to unpack this and dump the binary that falls out of the archive into a path that can be found somewhere in $PATH. In addition to traditional terminal-based tools such as pftop, the firewall GUI also offers very elegant add-on packages such as ntopng, so you can browse through pie charts and HTML tables to find out who uses the most bandwidth or contacts computers in dubious countries ( Figure 3).įigure 5: The login page's source code contains fields for the username and password.įor the webdriver.Firefox() call to work with the system's Firefox browser, the Linux distribution needs the geckodriver program, which is available as a TAR file.

If I want to know why router lights are flickering, I only need to call the pfSense GUI to see who is streaming Spotify, watching Netflix, or ordering on Amazon ( Figure 2). On the LAN side, it provides access to the Internet for all devices connected to my home network (in my case, a series of routed subnets).Įquipped with a four-core Celeron, it's powerful enough to look at every single packet, create statistics or even intervene when needed, and block certain communication attempts according to predefined firewall rules. The Protectli appliance is directly connected to the Internet-facing interface (in my case, a DSL modem to the ISP). Figure 2: Finally, a device to monitor all of your home's network traffic.

Protectli pfsense