One of the main interests of pfSsense is the possibility of load-balancing with multiple ADSL lines. However, it raises some issues with certain sites whose sessions are related to the client IP. Indeed, imagine that when one logs on a site with a login / password connection will be made on a first line but the display of the next page goes through a second: the site will see two IP addresses different and will assume that this is not the same session and the user will again be called to enter his login. We can create a rule in the firewall to force traffic to the IP of the site on a given line, which solves the problem.
Another example is the case of YouTube, which often display a message "Sorry, this video is no longer available". The video is actually there but the load-balancing break sessions ... The difficulty here is that YouTube has a large number of different IP addresses and it is difficult to create as many rules manually.
To remedy this, simply create an alias YouTube in pfSense that will include the IP address ranges used by YouTube. It will then create a rule in the firewall to redirect traffic to a single line.
Continue reading "pfSense, load-balancing and YouTube"
