Are pfsense firewalls any good for home or business? Which businesses are supported by pfsense? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using pfsense? How big can they go? Lots of questions! Fortunately Tom answers these and many more in this video. // MENU // 00:00 ▶ Introduction 01:29 ▶ What pfSense is and Tom's experience with pfSense 03:43 ▶ Tom and Open Source 04:38 ▶ The benefit of pfSense being Open Source 05:21 ▶ Systems Tom has deployed with pfSense 07:22 ▶ pfSense licensing cost 09:09 ▶ Using pfSense at home 11:45 ▶ Virtualization 12:28 ▶ Raspberry Pi support 13:02 ▶ Virtualization vs hardware 14:37 ▶ Tom's recommendation for small/medium businesses 19:43 ▶ pfSense actual cost (pfSense vs pfSense+) 22:22 ▶ Reasons not to use pfSense 24:45 ▶ Tom's biggest pfSense deployment 26:07 ▶ pfSense above 10G 27:11 ▶ pfSense and VPN 28:32 ▶ Handling lots of VPN connections 29:29 ▶ Advice for starting a consulting business 31:09 ▶ Technical skills vs sales skills 32:22 ▶ The benefit of having sales skills 35:58 ▶ It's about the customer, not the product you use 38:02 ▶ How Tom got his first customers 40:21 ▶ Why Tom has a KZread channel 43:46 ▶ This video is not sponsored by a VPN company 43:53 ▶ Skills to learn in 2022 to get started 48:13 ▶ Story 1 - Hacked client 49:10 ▶ Story 2 - That will never happen in the real world 51:28 ▶ Story 3- We've all done it 52:40 ▶ Final advice 54:15 ▶ Networking with people // David's SOCIAL // Discord: discord.com/invite/usKSyzb Twitter: twitter.com/davidbombal Instagram: instagram.com/davidbombal LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidbombal Facebook: facebook.com/davidbombal.co TikTok: tiktok.com/@davidbombal KZread: kzread.info // Tom's SOCIAL // Twitter: twitter.com/TomLawrenceTech KZread: kzread.info Website: lawrencesystems.com/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencesystems/ Instagram: instagram.com/lawrencesystems/ // MY STUFF // www.amazon.com/shop/davidbombal // SPONSORS // Interested in sponsoring my videos? Reach out to my team here: sponsors@davidbombal.com Please note that links listed may be affiliate links and provide me with a small percentage/kickback should you use them to purchase any of the items listed or recommended. Thank you for supporting me and this channel!

@camarodingdoruan4015

2 жыл бұрын

How about OPNsense firewall, is it also good for home and small business firewall?

@ThePeoplesWill

2 жыл бұрын

PFSense is better than no firewall. However it pales in comparison to enterprise grade NGFW. As someone who has architected in the network security space for going on 12 years now, enterprise grade functions, filters, application awareness, cloud content analysis, AV engines, and vulnerability protections of Palo Alto, Fortinet, Checkpoint, and even firepower blow PFSense out of the water. However, would I trust PFsense in my home network? Yes. Would I trust it in a simple SMB? Yes. The differentiating factor for me is WHO is managing it. Is it mr CEO do it all? Or is it a MSP? However, vendors like fortinet for example have firewalls at a very affordable price. Heck Even Palo Alto has affordable firewalls now. I just finished a BOM where we bought 1Gbps firewalls with a bundle of NGFW features and we paid $2800 for 3 years.

@jwmj2897

2 жыл бұрын

Awesome video, you two. Encouraging, informative, and would love to see more in the future!!

@keylanoslokj1806

Жыл бұрын

Which firewall would you recommend for a professional who works from home?

@2APatriot

10 ай бұрын

After several failures with commercial firewalls that won't patch issues many of my vendors are now recommending OpnSense. I use it for many projects and would be comfortable using it at my workplace come hardware refresh time. Especially with the security features it has.

This was a lot of fun! Thanks thanks for taking the time to do this.

@edwinswartz7084

2 жыл бұрын

I enjoyed it really, honestly two of the best tech KZreadrs

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and experience with all of us Tom!

@anwar.shamim

2 жыл бұрын

We Do Love David & Lawrence

@alrickyt9075

2 жыл бұрын

Lawrence System made me love open source!

@Ntnher

2 жыл бұрын

Both of my tech persons together. This was an awesome talk.

This is gold. Tons of respect for both of you guys.

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

David and Lawrence, always talking about the right stuff. These guys are gold.

Tom has taught me so much about pfsense through his videos. I've been running it since 2015. I started off with a Netgate SG3100 but ran out of puff when I upgraded my WAN to 1Gb. So I bought a second hand Dell R210 M2 with a 4 port Intel NIC and rolled my own pfsense box. Reddit was useful to get suggestions for the best hardware platform for my needs and I paid about £170 in total for the machine, NIC and SSD that it runs on. I have multiple VLANs for different networks, WAN redundancy over 4G, multiple OpenVPN servers for me and the segregated guest network, custom firewall rules and UPS monitoring. All of this I've learned from Tom's videos. Tom's video's are a total wealth of guidance and help and his delivery is such that he gives a lot of confidence. If I want to do something with pfsense, Tom's channel is the first place I go to.

@wishusknight3009

2 жыл бұрын

I have been running PFSense since at least 2011 Started with a Pentium 4 HT box and 100mb nic and gig intel pci nic and 512mb ram. As time went on i virtualized it in around 2015 and as of about 2019 run a dedicated box once again when I upgraded to gig internet connection. Which consists of an i3 2100 and 2 gigs ram with a couple intel e1000 nics. Great setup for just a regular geeked out family of 4. The virtual server I had was not coping too well with the gig connection and rather than upgrade a server that otherwise worked well for my needs, just build a dedicated box to make use of the hardware offload those inexpensive intel nics offer. And its hardware that allows me to tweak the voltages of the cpu and ram ect, so its undervolted a bit, and consumes very little power. Yet its performance is just wonderful. I have always loved PFSENSE.. it is great as well for traffic shaping.. When the kid has been playing on his computer a little too long, I can get in and start to get him to lag out ever so slightly. Where he can still play but gets a little frustrated and starts doing something more productive.... It is worth it for that alone lol.

@rjy8960

2 жыл бұрын

@@wishusknight3009 I need to understand a little more about shaping - I'm looking to do that for the 4G WAN failover port and reduce download traffic to about 20Mbps and upload to about 2Mbps - reason being that the SIM is a prepayment with 25GB allowance and a 2 year expiry so only want it to be there for when it needs to be used. I also need to see if I can stop the dpinger process constantly pinging the 4G network when it's not required.

an hour long video on pfsense, david bombal and Lawrence systems... i never knew i wanted this! 😃 i love this! 😊

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Hope you enjoyed it!

I love these kinds of videos. Although I have my own network setup but having videos where you have two big network youtubers having a real conversations without it being prescripted is refreshing.

We use open source in the military. In one embarrassing moment I had to explain to an officer that his "new top secret battalion level chat room" was in fact just mIRC on a laptop and some of us had been using it since we were 14 years old.

@tolpacourt

2 жыл бұрын

Sounds extremely insecure.

@user-vh8gs1sw1j

3 ай бұрын

@@tolpacourt Sure, if you don't have a clue.

2 of my favourite guys on KZread. Loved every minute of the conversation. Best 1 hour spent. Legends 👍

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you Parry! Much appreciated!

@parmindersbedi

2 жыл бұрын

@@davidbombal You’re a legend David. You give so much back to the community and help out so many people in need, it’s just admirable and inspirational. Wish you all the best 🙏🏻

Stumbled upon this video after a few weeks of networking research (for setting up networking in my home). I'm a web developer who's dabbled in the business side of things as well and there's a ton of fantastic advice in your video here; thanks for much to the both of you for sharing!

I'm happy that you and Tom has had a time to conversation and sharing knowledge about firewalls. I hope there would be more videos between the two of you sharing your knowledge :)

I am so much fun listening to both of you guys, I've been using pfSense for more than a decade now.

I just spent half a day researching firewalls for my home network and I found Tom's channel and he's very informative. I was debating on purchasing a Netgate SG1100 with pfSense and now that I see Tom on your channel it made my decision even easier! Thanks guys!

Two of the best KZread! Learned Cisco from David and Unifi and pfSense from Tom. You guys keep rocking!! We are watching and learning.

I use it extensively. Primarily to control access to the management network, but also to protect guest networks and add a secondary control to VPN systems. Been using since 2011. It's great!

First time hearing about PFSense and already plotting how to deploy this... Thank you David for the interview... and Tom is a true salesman, definitely going to build a sales skill as advised by Tom.

Awesome video David! I appreciate Tom and you having this conversation. Very interesting and I enjoyed it. Thanks for all the videos you do. And to Tom as well. Great guys to learn from.

I bought the Netgate SG 3100 several years ago as my edge firewall, router, etc and I absolutely love it. This is coming from a 17 year network engineering veteran that is defintiely a Cisco guy.

I love the way Tom speaks and he is the sole reason I went pfSense after decades of Sonicwall.

Another well invested hour of my time :) Now I finally have to try out pfsense myself! Thank you gentlemen !

I've been using pfsense for almost 10 years now, was in ipcop before. I'm loving pfsense.

You are both amazing people sharing your knowledge, I think that’s what it’s all about, lots of respect, have been watching Tom’s vids for years fantastic!

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks 👍 Tom's great!

A great conversation. Very much impressed with Tom's explanation even with tricky questions.

Love pfsense. Started using it about 5 years ago. Thanks to Tom's channel. I do not use it to it's full capacity, but it works well and stable.

I run a small shop with about 40 users. We use an old decommissioned Dell Haswell era desktop computer with a Intel quad port server NIC to route our 250 MB fiber internet using the community edition of pfSense. We've been using this for 4 or so years now. It has been rock solid. I has never NEEDED to be rebooted other than when it receives upgrades. When the pandemic hit there was a frenzy to allow remote workers. Luckily I had already set up way for pfSense to authenticate to our Active Directory. We now have ~30 of our employees securely working remotely. The addition of OpenVPN remote workers was simple. Getting the remote computers ready for users to take home was what slowed the project. We also have a site to site VPN used for our offsite backups. We will be moving this to a Dell 1U server. I've tried this offline several times and it seems to be VERY simple.

Thank you David Bombal. I have been on fence following you for a while and I must admit your content is super. You bring in the Top guns in subjects that we need now in real world. Thanks for bringing the likes of Neil Bridges, Tom Lawrence and Hammond. I am a fun and there is no going back....I love your content.

Thank you David for having Tom on a chat about pfsense

David great interview with Tom. Love his reviews of products, saved me much time and effort. Also have encouraged prospects to view his how to s. Tom and I have similar views similar and the value proposition open source. Again great job.

Very good video, thanks so much for all of the information and I love the interaction between both of you!!

You guys rock! Love watching both of yours episodes!

This was amazing. Thanks for doing this Interview! Thanks Tom!

Two of my favorite influencers!!! What a combination?

Been running pfsens on vmware at home since I was a student ~20yrs ago, and since having lots of projects using it, no matter big or small, from the cloud, DC to on-perm. Learn a lot from them and pfsense never let me down :D

My dear teacher David Bombal and my favorite IT coach. Thanks God. Bless you guys regards from Mexico.

this was a really great video. thanks to you both!

Really like your insightful podcast videos on your channel David. Questions you've asked are really helpful especially to younger audience. Much appreciate to Tom who is open (not just open-source) and honest in sharing his opinion. Keep making more collabs like this with insightful questions!

Tom is the best! I started to use pFsense because of him and my networks are working fine and secure!!!

David and Tom, this was a very useful video. I think the title of the video is underwhelming, because when I first saw the title, and that the video was 56 minutes long, I thought that there was no way that there could be a 56 minute discussion about pfSense. But the second half of this video was highly valuable for everyone in IT, especially for people who want to broaden their role in it, or to change careers to IT.

I went to OPNSense after Netgate was in denial on leaking (my) personal data on their (old) forum. As they were not serious about securing their forum, I extended that observation to their products.

Been waiting on a video like this for a while, thanks David!

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

Awesome Video Bro. Bigup to both your guys for the advise.

Great conversation. Thank you for this opportunity where I did learn a lot. I'm looking to install a home pf-sense my self. Lets see how it goes. 😃

My two favorite KZread guys for Tech information.

Thank David tag with Lawrence, I am a longtime old fan of Lawrence, he is awesome with firewall & network stuff. Thanks again David

The main difference between an expert and a novice is not that an expert doesn’t make mistakes, but that an expert knows how to recover from the mistake without panicking.

Great video! I love the real life experience and an the sharing of knowledge. It can be intimidating choosing or changing a career thank you!

Awesome video, thanks David and Tom!

Great job on asking what feature he is not recommending to use in pfsense. All the positive stuff you find on a flyer but the negative things are the ones you can only get from someone that has experience with the product.

Thanks guys, I love your great work!

Two of my favorite KZreadrs in one video!!!

Great discussion, thanks a lot to both of you.

I've been running pfSense for about 6 years. Initially I used an old PC, but for about 1.5 years on a Qotom mini PC. I'm quite happy with it.

David and Tom, thank you so much for this interview, you're both some of my best guys, I also use opensource solution for security and VoIP, for security I do use pfSense, and most of the configs I've done through Tom's videos. David Bombal my master, I've enrolled in couple of his udemy videos and it always help at some moment in tech life.

Loved this video. Thanks!!

I’ve set up a pretty strong home network with netgate and ubiquiti due to watching Tom’s videos. Thanks for this.

Thanks for interviewing Tom, David Bombal,(and Tom for agreeing!). When I need to research a network item Tom's channel is on the list. Love it when content creators I respect do this, appreciated the business and career focus. Especially talking points at 38:12, engaging and the comment on give more then you demand. Thank you.

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you James!

thnx, one of the best realworld IT discussions

Wow great meeting here. Very nice conversation. Keep it up! (you both =D)

I run Pfsense at home and love it. Very versatile and just chugs along. Running on an old HP Proliant NL54.

I really enjoyed this!

Am looking into pfsense. Loved this video discussion to get a general sense of this software. Also great advice on developing sales skills, as this will help sell your business OR sell your solutions internally for getting the budget to actually implement it.

2 of the best in the industry in terms of sharing knowledge!

I’ve been using pfSense for years and love it. There are four issues IMO that we're not covered in this video. 1) The lack of a good interface for inbound rules. Each interface has a page for outbound rules. This becomes an issue when controlling traffic between VLANs. You can use the floating tab to control inbound rules, but that’s one tab with rules for all interfaces. It’s really a bad design and makes understanding your rules and where and how they are applied confusing. Each interface should have an inbound and outbound rule page. I will use pfctl to look at rules for each interface to see exactly what's being filtered on each interface. However, since pfSense is designed t be operated via a web interface, there should be a clear way to see all rules via that interface. 2) There are several NAT limitations. The Port Forward NAT section has limitations, but should be as flexible as Outbound NAT. Also, there is no support for double NAT. I think Cisco calls this twice NAT. i.e. The ability to modify source IP and/or port on incoming packets and the ability to modify destination IP and/or port on outgoing packets. I can't recall if this is a limitation of pf or not, but it is useful in some situations. Cisco added "twice NAT" to ASAs around 8 years ago I believe. 3) The lack of a cli like you’d find in an SRX or VyOS. I get that not everyone is comfortable with a cli and new users probably just want a web interface, but if setting up bonded ports for wan and/or lan, you have to set up pfSense one way using their console cli, then get into the web GUI and then change everything to bond the ports. It can be a cumbersome process and one small mistake and you have to start over. There are other advantages of a cli like quickly being able to see a full config for something vs multiple pages in a web interface, easily copying config, making a few changes and applying it to the same or another device. 3) One more issue with pfSense is the limit of one IPsec VPN setup for remote users. We use OpenVPN to get around it, but back in the day some things had to be IPsec and not being able to have multiple setups for remote users were some users can access limited stuff and others can access more or everything was an issue. I have’t tried this in years, so things may have improved. Again OpenVPN works great for this provided your requirements don’t negate its use.

Interesting collaboration of two interesting people about different interesting topics.

This was great. Good editing too.

i love both of them.great video

Thanks you sir David for a new video... Hope you are doing well...

I trust Tom. He's reputable and he knows what he's doing.

great conversation and fun to listen.

Awesome interview, David -- subscribed

Tom has helped me no end! Started with Freenas 9, Now on Scale with Pfsense & Cloudflare... It's been emotional at times! Would never of made it without Tom's help. Although I still can't get HA PROXY to work!! lol X

Thanks for sharing the conversation 😀

I started in pf sense as recommended by a friend, after all my issues with commercially available Home network Routers. I started with the Netgate SG-1100 this unit failed so I returned it. In its place I obtained a Netgate 2100 which is so much better in every way. I acquired a book Safer @ Home with pfsense which I am still working my way through. I have watched many videos from Lawrence Systems. I will say my entire Home network has been much more stable since using the pfsense box. I went down the route of ASUS, D-Link, Netgate, Bitdefender Routers, I have a Cyber intrusion which syphoned off 7 Tb of Data and my ISP was going to charge me for the data overage. This was the beginning of the journey to make safe the Home Network System.

I was using DD-WRT on my Linksys router before I found IPCop. OpenVPN on IPCop was easy as pie. Then I tried Monowall before it got forked to pfSense. So been using pfSense since 2008.

What a beautiful interview!👏👏👏

Amazing Interview. Thanks David and Lawrence.

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Very happy to hear that!

NICE! What an awesome video guys, thanks!

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

Another great collaboration video!

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you Rodrigo!

Pfsense is super good .As a network engineer , I primarily work on cisco equipment, barracuda ngf + wafs and fortigates. But I have used pfsense in a few businesses.

@Seedlinux

2 жыл бұрын

Just curious, how is pfsense compared to hardware firewalls like Fortinet?

@Fallen7Pie

2 жыл бұрын

@@Seedlinux I crashed fortinet fuzzing several times in the past 10 years. They're popular in schools... Yah

great discussion! very interesting

I would really like to see something fleshed out as well as pfsense with turnkey hardware solutions, but on linux. The big reasons for me would be #1: vastly better hardware support #2: In-kernel wireguard #3: more flexibility and performance, nf/ip/x tables better scaling, etc

This was cool, thanks a lot

DB I'm back , Thankyou for giving the such an amazing informatie thing's ❤️❤️❤️

Great show. to me Tom Lawrence is the God of pfsense. I have learned so much watching his videos.

Im a huge fan of pfSense. For many years...even today many off the shelf solutions weren't optimized for bidirectional 1 Gbps throughput much less multigig. The ones that were cost thousands of dollars in hardware and licensing cost. Now ATT is offering 5 Gbps throughput to regular people. I can't think of any other solution other than pfSense that would be able to provide that much throughput.

@theangelofspace155

2 жыл бұрын

Routing 5Gbps on pfsense will be hard, you will need some powerful hardware (like a 6 core) due to the kernel routing use 😔

@XDTuber

2 жыл бұрын

@@theangelofspace155 the people who can afford a 5gbps internet can definitely afford a $600 computer

What a great enthusiastic interview :)

I love it! Watching both of you.

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Very happy to hear that!

Great insights, especially on community involvement :)

I'm late to the party here. But love this collab. Tom is a super re(open)sourceful guy.

Thanks for a great show, wish I was 20 again😎 now I have an extra 40+ years, but there's always something to learn. Tomorrow I will have to setup a pfsense lab for my home/office.

Love to see Tom on the channel!

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for your support Ben!

Been waiting for this

This was fantastic.

It always makes me happy 2 see 2 of my favorite u2bers 2gether 🤗

Thanks for interviewing Tom Lawrence, that's how I found your channel. I just subscribed.

@davidbombal

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you Richard

Love this , Thanks a lot... ✌

Fantastic interview, is a great man

Very interesting content guys!

Great interview. Tom is a good man.

Awesome collaboration...