El Presidente: S02e03 H255
(con voz temblorosa) “Si lo lanzamos… la gente no sabrá que está siendo observada. Pero si lo detenemos,… perdemos la oportunidad de salvar el país de su propio caos.” Álvaro se arrodilla frente a la mesa, mirando a cada uno de sus colegas.
(sonriendo sin humor) “Presidente, pensé que estarías demasiado ocupado con los discursos para…” ÁLVARO (interrumpe) “No hay discurso que justifique traicionar al pueblo. H‑255 es un atentado contra la libertad.” Ricardo, que hasta ahora había permanecido al margen, saca una tablet y muestra una transmisión en vivo de la plaza, donde cientos de manifestantes gritan: “¡No a la vigilancia!”. el presidente s02e03 h255
(voz interior) “Cuando juré defender a este país, nunca pensé que la defensa vendría de los pasillos de mi propio palacio.” Álvaro llega a la Torre de Vigilancia, un edificio de cristal donde la Oficina de Inteligencia Nacional (OIN) monitorea cada movimiento. Dentro, la directora de la OIN, Clara Ríos , le muestra una pantalla con el número H‑255 parpadeando. (con voz temblorosa) “Si lo lanzamos… la gente
(pensando en voz alta) “Un presidente no es quien impone su voluntad, sino quien escucha al pueblo, aunque a veces esa escucha duela.” Una figura se acerca sigilosamente: Clara Ríos , con una carpeta bajo el brazo. H‑255 es un atentado contra la libertad
“No se trata solo de prevenir disturbios. Se trata de asegurar la continuidad del gobierno. El país necesita estabilidad, y la estabilidad requiere… decisiones difíciles.” De repente, la puerta se abre. Álvaro irrumpe, con la determinación de un león herido.
“Eso… eso no está en los archivos de la OIN. Es… una pista.” ACTO 2 – LA REUNIÓN DE LOS SOMBROS Interior – Salón de la Casa Rosada, noche. Solo una luz tenue ilumina una mesa ovalada. Alrededor, los miembros del gabinete: María Ledesma (Ministra de Economía), Ricardo Vega (Jefe de Seguridad), Sofía Duarte (Consejera Legal) y, por supuesto, Julián Ortega .
(con voz firme) “Si la democracia se vuelve una excusa para la tiranía, entonces la verdadera traición es no defenderla. Este proyecto se cancela.” Julián levanta una mano, como si fuera a golpear la mesa, pero se detiene. La cámara enfoca su rostro: un conflicto interno, una lucha entre la lealtad a su amigo y la ambición desmedida. ACTO 3 – EL DESENLACE Exterior – Azotea de la Casa Rosada. Álvaro, solo, mira la ciudad iluminada. La brisa nocturna lleva consigo los ecos de los cánticos.
This article is a work in progress and will continue to receive ongoing updates and improvements. It’s essentially a collection of notes being assembled. I hope it’s useful to those interested in getting the most out of pfSense.
pfSense has been pure joy learning and configuring for the for past 2 months. It’s protecting all my Linux stuff, and FreeBSD is a close neighbor to Linux.
I plan on comparing OPNsense next. Stay tuned!
Update: June 13th 2025
Diagnostics > Packet Capture
I kept running into a problem where the NordVPN app on my phone refused to connect whenever I was on VLAN 1, the main Wi-Fi SSID/network. Auto-connect spun forever, and a manual tap on Connect did the same.
Rather than guess which rule was guilty or missing, I turned to Diagnostics > Packet Capture in pfSense.
1 — Set up a focused capture
Set the following:
192.168.1.105(my iPhone’s IP address)2 — Stop after 5-10 seconds
That short window is enough to grab the initial handshake. Hit Stop and view or download the capture.
3 — Spot the blocked flow
Opening the file in Wireshark or in this case just scrolling through the plain-text dump showed repeats like:
UDP 51820 is NordLynx/WireGuard’s default port. Every packet was leaving, none were returning. A clear sign the firewall was dropping them.
4 — Create an allow rule
On VLAN 1 I added one outbound pass rule:
The moment the rule went live, NordVPN connected instantly.
Packet Capture is often treated as a heavy-weight troubleshooting tool, but it’s perfect for quick wins like this: isolate one device, capture a short burst, and let the traffic itself tell you which port or host is being blocked.
Update: June 15th 2025
Keeping Suricata lean on a lightly-used secondary WAN
When you bind Suricata to a WAN that only has one or two forwarded ports, loading the full rule corpus is overkill. All unsolicited traffic is already dropped by pfSense’s default WAN policy (and pfBlockerNG also does a sweep at the IP layer), so Suricata’s job is simply to watch the flows you intentionally allow.
That means you enable only the categories that can realistically match those ports, and nothing else.
Here’s what that looks like on my backup interface (
WAN2):The ticked boxes in the screenshot boil down to two small groups:
app-layer-events,decoder-events,http-events,http2-events, andstream-events. These Suricata needs to parse HTTP/S traffic cleanly.emerging-botcc.portgrouped,emerging-botcc,emerging-current_events,emerging-exploit,emerging-exploit_kit,emerging-info,emerging-ja3,emerging-malware,emerging-misc,emerging-threatview_CS_c2,emerging-web_server, andemerging-web_specific_apps.Everything else—mail, VoIP, SCADA, games, shell-code heuristics, and the heavier protocol families, stays unchecked.
The result is a ruleset that compiles in seconds, uses a fraction of the RAM, and only fires when something interesting reaches the ports I’ve purposefully exposed (but restricted by alias list of IPs).
That’s this keeps the fail-over WAN monitoring useful without drowning in alerts or wasting CPU by overlapping with pfSense default blocks.
Update: June 18th 2025
I added a new pfSense package called Status Traffic Totals:
Update: October 7th 2025
Upgraded to pfSense 2.8.1:
Fantastic article @hydn !
Over the years, the RFC 1918 (private addressing) egress configuration had me confused. I think part of the problem is that my ISP likes to send me a modem one year and a combo modem/router the next year…making this setting interesting.
I see that Netgate has finally published a good explanation and guidance for RFC 1918 egress filtering:
I did not notice that addition, thanks for sharing!