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Multi-WAN routing with pfSense

A friend of mine, Jim Mischel, recently wrote up his experienced with Multi-WAN routing with pfSense on his blog.

He'd asked me for some advice, but not having used pfSense before I wasn't really any help. My inclination was to use straight-up OpenBSD, but Jim didn't want to learn an OS just to get this problem solved, which is understandable.

Still, installing OpenBSD is easy, and the OpenBSD FAQ covers load balancing outgoing traffic with just a few simple lines added to pf.conf(5). Sometimes, the hard road turns out to be the quickest, most powerful and flexible. I'm sure pfSense serves many purposes well, but when you go outside the typical usage you might consider going to the foundation that pfSense is built on.

By dwc at 2007/08/31 - 2:42pm | | login to post comments

I fully agree. I did my

I fully agree. I did my stint with both m0n0wall and pfSense; I admire the projects for their goal of producing an "easy to use" BSD router/appliance, and for integrating so many technologies, but my adoration stops short. Each time I used them on my embedded platforms, I found myself very quickly stepping outside the realm of integration they provided and ultimately needing a full-fledged Unix environment to work in. By one example, the difficulty of porting my PF ruleset to the WebGUI click-to-add form became tiresome about 7 rules into it. Sometimes it's much easier to just break out vi, awk, and sed and be done with it. :)

In actuality, there's nothing more "integrated" than the base operating system as it is; regardless how many "features" they integrate into their projects, they still sum up to less than what you have in the base OS anyway. Nice, but still somewhat incomplete.

By sancho at 2007/09/01 - 10:01pm | login to post comments