Conproly

As readers of this blog might know, I’ve been a long time user of PfSense. Throughout the years, this firewall has served me well, even though certain features don’t seem to get the priority they deserve (hello zone based firewall policies). Recently, I’ve encountered some quirky behavior on multiple occassions. When running PfSense in a virtual machine, certain scenarios can cause the software to become confused about interface assignments. These scenarios can be difficult to mitigate. This post shows you how to restore the firewall to its proper state.

For a client who operates a campsite, I installed a new Aruba 7010 WLC with a few outdoor AP’s (AP375’s). The campsite runs a PfSense firewall that also serves a captive portal page for guest WiFi access. Getting the Aruba WLC to play nice with the external captive portal was not very straightforward. In this post, I explain the challenges I ran into and how to solve them.

On Cisco switches that do not perform routing, setting up a default route or a default gateway can be a little bit confusing. I’ve seen some configuration drift in our network recently were incorrect settings caused some switches to become unreachable for management. Read on to find out the details.

While preparing to dive into Ansible and Nornir a lot more, I decided to set up a good lab environment. Making use of Eve-NG and some well-known Linux tools, you can build whatever you need. I’ve built a simple topology based on Cisco for switching and Juniper for routing, to try out any automation tool I choose. Read on to find out more.

I had to migrate my reverse proxy away from the PfSense package to a standalone solution. One requirement was having automated certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Manually setting up all kinds of Linux applications will become tedious, so once again we’re looking at leveraging Docker to simplify operations.