Since PF replaced IPF on OpenBSD starting with OpenBSD 3.0, it has become a world-class firewalling solution. Within PF, there are some excellent facilities to help the firewaller build a robust solution providing a protection for private networks in a hostile internet. The goal of this article is to give you a good step-by-step on setting up your PF firewall, and explains each step sufficiently, but not so deep that it would confuse.

There are a few things that you need to have ready prior to following this how-to. I will outline how to get these things ready so that we can get to the meat-and-potatoes of this article. The first thing that you need is OpenBSD version 3.0 or later. At a mininum, you should have OpenBSD already installed. I have geared this article for OpenBSD 3.3. While you can find many good how-to's on setting up the firewall, my main focus is how to build and configure your firewall config correctly from the ground-up.

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