What is the Floating (floating) rule?

Floating rules can apply firewall rules in any direction and any one or more interfaces. Floating rules must be defined on the floating label of the firewall > rule.

Most firewalls do not need any floating rules, or they may only have traffic. If you choose to use floating rules, you can make some complex filtering schemes easier to implement than logically tracking GUI. The high / low level options for floating rules can be found in each common interface rule.

Floating rules:

Traffic filtered from the firewall itself

Filter outbound traffic (other tabs are limited to inbound processing only)

Rules can be applied to multiple interfaces

Apply filtering in the way of "last match" instead of "first match" (fast) to filter rules

Apply traffic × × to match traffic, but does not affect its passing / blocking operations

Floating rules are parsed before rules on other interfaces. Therefore, if the packet matches a floating rule and the Quick option is active in that rule, pfSense will not attempt to filter the packet based on any rule on any other group or interface tab.

Rules that use queue actions cannot use the Quick option.