Bandwidth management implementation is necessary to any small to large business if you want to keep your internet bandwidth in check and complete control. Without it, keeping your internet data usage under 20 GB a month for at least 5-PC clients will be impossible. This is one of the common challenges that System Administrators are facing here in PNG as too much usage of bandwidth will costs thousands of Kina more than what you should be spending.
For this, I have to mention a favorite open source firewall and router which comes with a bunch of features that you may not know yet and you don’t have to pay to have it as it is FREE. It is an OPEN SOURCE program as I have mentioned earlier.
While I like pfSense among other softwares that I have tried before, you must first learn how to install and configure it. The learning curve of doing this is a bit stiff but believe me, it is worth it as you will be rewarded a complete control in your network. I did a few tries and re-read the documentation multiple times before implementing it properly.
Below are the partial list of outstanding feature of pfSense:
- LAN/WAN Router
- Wireless Hotspot (Captive Portal)
- VPN Router
- Firewall
- Content Filter
- Proxy Server / Transparent Squid Proxy Server
- Multi WAN Router / Load Balance or Fail Over
- DNS Blacklist
- Port Forwarding / NAT (Network Address Translation)
You can’t have these features unless you are paying for top of the line firewall/router which will cost you a few thousands of dollars, but since it is OPEN SOURCE, you don’t have to spend a cent.
To learn more about pfsense, visit this website www.pfsense.org.
This is just an introductory post for PFSense, in my next post I’ll show you how I implemented it using Hyper-V and how we controlled our bandwidth usage by configuring our firewall & content filtering/proxy server.
Stay tuned.