Apple devices internet connection drops

1amt0ny

stephenw10

You see no blocked traffic at all? I would expect to see quite a lot of blocks on WAN unless you are using double NAT.

1amt0ny

@stephenw10 no traffic seems can be pointed to LAN devices

MacOS

Mercury MW300R router, change the WAN/INTERNET setting from DHCP to BRIDGE mode. Bridge mode disable DHCP server, firewall, NAT....all the stuff that pfsense provides. In other words, in bridge mode it be comes a true AP. You won't have to change WiFi settings. They should be saved.

Next physically connect both devices together, pfsense LAN port to mercury LAN port (not the WAN or Internet port).

1amt0ny

@macos yeah so Mercury doesn’t have a bridge mode itself, so I connected Pfsense LAN to Mercury LAN physically and then set the LAN ip in Mercury to be the same LAN ip in pfsense while disabling the DHCP in Mercury. This is the setup I did

johnpoz

@1amt0ny said in Apple devices internet connection drops:

LAN to Mercury LAN physically and then set the LAN ip in Mercury to be the same LAN ip in pfsense while disabling the DHCP in Mercury

Huh? What IP did you set this old wifi routers lan IP to be?

So to use any old wifi router as just an AP.. Yes you connect it to your network via one of its lan ports. But you set the IP to be on the network your running.

So lets say pfsense is 192.168.1.1/24 as its lan address. So turn off the dhcp server on the old wifi router, set its IP to be say 192.168.1.2/24

then on your pfsense the dhcp range would be say 192.168.1.10 - .254

This gives you .3 to .9 to work with as well for more static set devices.

If you set the AP IP to be the same as pfsense 192.168.1.1 in my example - yeah you would be having a heck of time with stuff working.

stephenw10

Mmm, if you actually set the same IP you would see all sorts of issues. I would also expect to see pfSense complaining about that in the system logs.

Steve

1amt0ny

@johnpoz I set both of them to be 10.40.0.0/24, is that the problem?

stephenw10

No, that's fine. They need to be in the same subnet just not actually the same IP address.

johnpoz

@1amt0ny said in Apple devices internet connection drops:

10.40.0.0/24, is that the problem?

Yeah that would be a problem - and that is actually a network not a host address.. Set pfsense to be say 10.40.0.1/24 and your AP to be 10.40.0.2/24

MacOS

pfsense has a 'recipe' for this type of setup.

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/external-wireless-router.html?highlight=wireless%20router

By the way, if you plug Mercury the WAN port into pfsense LAN port, pfsense logs will show the IP address/traffic of only the Mercury. This is because wireless clients are behind Mercury FW/NAT.

By using both LAN ports (LAN to LAN port) you bypass the internal Mercury software/apps which at this point is essentially a just switch with WiFi.

Hope this helps.