FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS (2019)

Speaker: Conor Beh

pfSense is the world’s most trusted open source firewalling and routing platform, providing essential features to supply your infrastructure with commercial-grade security and connectivity. Leveraging OpenBSD’s stateful packet filter “pf” (since ported to several other OS’s, including FreeBSD), pf includes the capabilities of Network Address Translation, various traffic shaping methods, and even the ability to differentiate different operating systems. pfSense maintains high flexibility as a platform providing more than just a firewall. It includes the ability to setup captive portals, three methods for VPN connectivity, high-availability and the ability to monitor all these systems in action with a great monitoring and reporting suite right from the web interface. Come learn about this fine platform that has even powered LFNW's WiFi!

FreeNAS is the world’s most popular open source storage operating system. Combining the stability of FreeBSD with the renowned integrity and performance of the OpenZFS filesystem and volume manager, it can offer great functionality and ease of management from its angular-based web UI. Sporting a plethora of different protocols to share data including iSCSI, NFS, and SMB. FreeNAS can even add more functionality using a Plugin system that leverages FreeBSD jails to safely compartmentalize services. It even supports full blown virtual machines with the bhyve hypervisor. You'll be able to run your services in these jails and VM's just like a normal FreeBSD install so you can see for yourself how FreeNAS can be the first step into the BSD ecosystem. We’ll talk about how you can put all these to work sharing data effectively to your users.