From the course: Firewall Administration Essential Training

Document your design

From the course: Firewall Administration Essential Training

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Document your design

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- [Instructor] Now, we have a few things I want you to have written down before we go any further. The first is I want you to know what the IP address is of your router or firewall. So we're in pfSense here, and your firewall will have two addresses. One will be its address on your LAN, and the other will be the address that it's getting from your ISP. The internet service provider will likely be providing you with an IP address over DHCP, so you don't need to know that one. It'll be coming to you automatically. The one I want you to decide on is the one that your LAN will use because that will be the IP address you will use to get into the web interface on your pfSense router throughout this course. The second thing is the subnet mask. Third, I want you to put in your IP address range that you'll be handing out over DHCP to clients on your network. Once you have those things, next I need you to have the range of addresses that you're going to reserve for servers, static printers, and other permanently addressed stuff on your network. The reason is you're going to be handing out addresses over DHCP to clients that come and go on your network, but anything that needs to be addressed consistently will need to have a consistent address. And there needs to be a specific space set aside that is not within the DHCP range to do that. So set that space aside, and write that down. Next, I want you to write down your DNS server address, if you have one on your local network. And if you do not have one on your local network, you simply need to know what the DNS server addresses are that are closest to your router. Now, that's always going to be the internet service provider's DNS servers because they are the next hop up on your network. But if you have other DNS servers you want to use instead, like, for example, Google at 8.8.8.8 or a Layer 3 at 4.2.2.1 or any of the others that may be favorites, go ahead and write those down as well. I also want you to write down the IPv4 addresses of any servers you're going to have on your network locally or services that you're going to serve up from computers or devices locally that you want to be available to people outside of your network. We'll be setting up firewall rules to access things that are on the inside of your network from folks that are on the outside of the network. And in order to do that, you need to know what those numbers are. Now, if you have access to the support folder of additional content here, you're going to have access to restore files to get your pfSense router back to a known state. If you get lost, there'll be several points throughout the course where I create those files, and they'll be located there. And also, this document that I'm asking you to write right now, I'll have an example, a prewritten basic set of notes on the addressing scheme and the systems that are referenced throughout this course.

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