Firewall Testing?

[DJMelvin]

HI everyone, I loved this show ans beginning watching from season 3. I'm new to the forum, hopefully I can make some friends here

My question, does anyone know how to perform open-source firewall testing? In particular, load testing or performance testing? I've been running a pfsense firewall (introduced in hak5 segment in the previous season) and i'm interested to see how it will perform in my 5 year old PC. Does hak5 going to do another segment on this ?

Hope will have some guiding, thanks! ;)

[digininja]

Depends on what you want to test and what you are using it for. For most people using this kind of setup at home all they care about is throughput so the easiest way to test this is to download large files with and without the firewall in place and compare what speeds you get. If you regularly do uploads then you can do the same, find somewhere you can send a file to and what that.

For checking its performance when dealing with multiple sessions just download multiple files and check the performance then.

That is a quick way to do free testing that covers what the normal user would consider important.

[DJMelvin]

Thanks for replying!! :D

Good point, I forgotten to mention on that. I actually set 2 firewall at 2 different place, 1 is for my small lab in my home and another one is in my small office. I'll do some ssh, ftp connection from various remote places and serve as server for some of my client to connect.

My point is, I need to gather load test data to be gathered and analyzed to show performance under different settings of pfsense. Is there any recommendation on what tools to use to load test a firewall?

Thanks in advance!