WAN DHCP IP wrong broadcast address
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Our Netgate 6100 is running 23.05.1-RELEASE and our WAN interface is setup to receive a DHCP IP address from the ISP. I am trying to diagnose a throughput issue and in the process of checking the configuration, I noticed that the broadcast address is wrong for the WAN IP. I am not sure if this is contributing to my issue, but when I run ifconfig -a, for ix3 I show the following:
inet 138.207.166.xxx netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 255.255.255.255
I would expect the broadcast to be 138.207.167.255 for network 138.207.164.0/22 (255.255.252.0). I have released and renewed the IP multiple times on this interface and keep getting the same result.
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That is entirely normal. I don't know that I've ever seen a broadcast other than 255.255.255.255.
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Interesting, we have 3 other 6100 gateways and 1 1100. None of the other gateways has a broadcast of 255.255.255.255 for the WAN IP. They are all displaying the correct broadcast for the subnet of their public IP address.
I guess I am trying to determine if this is a pfSense issue or a DHCP issue with the ISP? I was under the impression that the interface would automatically determine the correct broadcast address given the IP and subnet mask issued by the DHCP server.
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@mwierowski not sure it matters the local broadcast 255.255.255.255 vs a subnet or directed broadcast 192.168.0.255 for example on a 192.168.0.0/24 network..
Is something not working? I show a local 255.255.255.255 on my wan connection.
You would have to look to see if dhcp client on pfsense asks for broadcast.. If client doesn't ask for it, dhcp server prob not going to offer it. And if nothing offered then prob would just use default local all 255..
But again I don't see how it would matter in anyway in anything other than some very specific sort of setups, etc.
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@johnpoz Thanks. We were having a bandwidth throughput problem with the ISP. Long story short, the issue with throughput has been resolved and it was the provisioning the ISP had on the modem. But in the process of trying to diagnose the issue, I was going through all the settings on the gateway and noticed the broadcast address on the WAN.
The interesting thing about the issue we were having is when we plugged a laptop directly into the modem, we were getting the advertised bandwidth. When we placed the Netgate 6100 between the modem and laptop, the throughput would only be 1/4 of the advertised rating.
I ended up putting another laptop with iperf3 on the internal and external sides of the gateway as proof to the ISP the gateway was not limiting the bandwidth. The ISP re-provisioned the modem and that ended up resolving the issue.
