mmacleod.ca

Or How I learned to stop worrying and love my dual WAN with routed subnet and policy based routing pf firewall

One of the reasons I continue to use FreeBSD for my gateway/router/firewall is the pf firewall. My routing needs are way more elaborate than anything a pre-cooked router package like DD-WRT or even pfSense can do, so I have to roll my own firewall. Currently I have two DSL connections, through two different companies. I have a dynamic IP connection from my employer, Primus Canda, and I have a static IP connection with a routed /30 subnet from TekSavvy.

My setup needs to satisfy the following requirements:

• The Primus connection is used for all local LAN traffic
• The TekSavvy connection is used for all traffic to and from the routed subnet
• Connections from the local LAN to the routed subnet do not traverse the internet
• Traffic shaping on both connections, with different rulesets for each connection
• UPnP support, using miniupnpd

For the connection for the LAN, the traffic shaping needs to do the following:

1. SSH and DNS traffic need high priority
2. Traffic to and from my workplace VPN needs priority
3. VoIP traffic needs high priority
4. HTTP and regular web traffic should feel fast and responsive
5. Anything left over goes to P2P and other uncategorized traffic

For the connection with the routed subnet, the requirements are a little different:

1. SSH and DNS need high priority
2. Inbound FTP control traffic (ie, not the actual data but just the control connection) needs priority
3. Traffic originating from the routed subnet needs priority (this mostly just amounts to DNS requests and package updates
4. FTP data traffic needs to fill in whatever is left over

This is all possible with pf, and I find the pf.conf format to be far more readable and thus less prone to errors than an iptables config file. To accomplish this I use packet tagging to label packets, and then use policy based routing to direct and control the traffic.

Continue reading »