Category Archives: Nerd Stuff

How To Terminate Remote User VPN Connections From A pfSense Firewall

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*Update* The ‘halt’ functionality is now enabled by default in the latest releases of pfsense (v22.01 and greater). No more need to apply a patch manually.

If however you are stuck on older versions of pfsense and you wish to fully terminate a remote access vpn user connection and or you’re simply seeking a ‘how to’ terminate remote user connections, please read on ->

Often times, a network admin may want to disconnect remote access VPN users from a pfSense firewall for various reasons. Maybe users have stale connections and they simply forgot to log off and they’re sucking up resources/bandwidth unnecessarily. Maybe the person got fired but is still connected to the VPN from somewhere that may be difficult to find such as in a shared ‘field laptops’ environment. Whatever the case, pfSense disappointingly does not natively offer the option to fully terminate connections. If you’re thinking you can get away with it by using the kill command (blue x) ->

Well, you can forget about that because it only temporarily kills the connection on the server side. The client side VPN will then auto-reconnect itself shortly after putting you back to square one. The ‘kill’ command is pretty much useless in other words. What you need is the ‘Halt’ command. This will actually terminate the connection on the client side and force the user to manually sign back in if they want to reconnect. Essentially this is the real solution to punting remote access VPN users OFF your firewall!

But how do I enable the ‘halt’ command in pfSense? We’ll, I’m glad you asked. This is accomplished by installing the ‘Sytstem_Patches’ package from the package manager. ‘System_Patches’ then allows for patches to be applied to your firewall. Then, yep you guessed it, we will apply a patch to the firewall which enables the ‘halt’ command functionality. See the video below for a demonstration.

Once patched successfully, the ‘halt’ command function will become available here, indicated by a new red X (or white x in  a red circle, whatever) ->

*Patch contents + url/commit ID can be downloaded here.

Also recommend updating to pfSense software version 21.05.0 and above (otherwise patch may not apply successfully).

 

Technologies We Primarily Support

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