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 KZfaq 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 KZfaq: kzfaq.info // Tom's SOCIAL // Twitter: twitter.com/TomLawrenceTech KZfaq: kzfaq.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!

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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 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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Thank you David for having Tom on a chat about pfsense

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.

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 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 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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

My two favorite KZfaq guys for Tech information.

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.

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

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.

You guys rock! Love watching both of yours episodes!

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.

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

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

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

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.

Correction on Tom's statement that there aren't many firewalls that do TLS 1.3 decryption: All major firewall vendors do in fact support this. That information is very outdated.

Two of my favorite KZfaqrs in one video!!!

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.

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

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

Two legends together, amazing video!

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

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

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. 😃

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.

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!

David, make video on "How to choose laptop which has pre-built wifi adapter which is suitable for hacking and where we get monitor mode, packet siffing and more" Consequently, make video on laptop that is suitable for hacking

thnx, one of the best realworld IT discussions

Great discussion, thanks a lot to both of you.

Interesting collaboration of two interesting people about different interesting topics.

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

Thanks guys, I love your great work!

Awesome video, thanks David and Tom!

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

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

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!

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

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.

Thanks for sharing the conversation 😀

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.

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

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.

Love to see Tom on the channel!

I am using pfsense for a while now, I use VirtualBox for it and it works great!

Amazing Interview. Thanks David and Lawrence.

Been waiting for this

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

I use pfsense for home! I love it, switching back to my home router after my pfsense box went down, really sucked, my gf hated pfblockerng, now she doesnt mind it. The traffic is routed so efficiently. I set it up originally in 2018

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

Loved this video. Thanks!!

I‘am using pfsense since aged (in fact I was using momowall before). I have it in production virtualized with qemu and hyper-v. Works beautyfully

Another great collaboration video!

i love both of them.great video

For the BGP issue and other similar issues, you should have an out of band private network connected to terminal servers with secure bastion hosts connected to the private network and internet from one or more 3rd party carriers so you can reach the network devices in major outage situations or something equivalent to this kind of setup. This is the problem with products like Unify for enterprise as they have no console, no out of band options, etc. Regardless of what you use, you should have a sensible disaster recovery plan appropriately designed for what you have deployed and should be prepared to execute that plan.

Pfsense is great to work with, I set up a company a while back with a pre made box - but also for the cost of a network card built a back up machine that would plug and play if the pre made machine ever failed (they had an old PC they were not using - so for about an hour of my time I built the back up box) That is some very affordable redundency!

PFSense is a greatway to learn a lot about firewall, as well infact networking in general, I've got my firewall (PFsense) running on a VM and it works great.

great conversation and fun to listen.

What a beautiful interview!👏👏👏

I was confused about firewall which one should I bay Cisco firepower or fortigate.. ets, This is a great conversation, Best video that I've seen, you've been answered a lot of questions, Thanks a lot.

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.

Awesome collaboration...

I really enjoyed this!

Men, the advice on here is legendary!!!!

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

After trying other firewalls and the cost of license, i am very satisfied with pfsense.

This was great. Good editing too.

Tom is my go-to guy for pfSense how-to videos. pfSense is a Awesome product, that just works. I love it

I've been virtualizing my pfsense firewall on a 4-node proxmox cluster along with numerous other VM's for several years now. The cluster is made from ivy bridge generation supermicro fat-twins. All VM data is backed by ceph. I use it for actual workloads and lots of training and experimentation for work.

At times it feels like supporting a video