PPPoE and HW
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Hi, What I have is a sincere doubt. I've and ISP and I'm really inclined to change everything to PFsense ( now I have MKs). I heard (not remembering where) that PFsense is limited to 255 pppoe connections/clients. Is that true? or probably that is a hardware limitation. I have a Dell R710 with dedicated NIC's and SFPs entire for PFsense on proxmox with PCi Passthrough. I have about 1.500 clients. Will my hardware suffice? The last question. Services like TNSr are available to run virtualized or only on Netgate appliances? Thanks.
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The maximum concurrent logins is 255 by default:
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/RELENG_2_7_0/src/usr/local/www/services_pppoe_edit.php#L134
That number is somewhat arbitrary though. You can set a much larger value and as long as you're using external authentication it should work OK.
It's likely you would see some usability issues at 1500 users just accessing the status page.
I can only suggest trying it. I have no easy way to test that number of clients.Steve
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@stephenw10 Any suggestion for external authentication?
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It can only be Radius as far as I'm aware: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/services/pppoe-server.html#pppoe-server-configuration
Oh, and yes TNSR can run virtualised: https://docs.netgate.com/tnsr/en/latest/platforms/#virtual-machines
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@stephenw10 Thank you very much.
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I am currently in that same process, but I have been using pfsense with captive portal and freeradius for authentication for 8 years. I have a little more than 1800 clients and I am about to switch to pppoe with limiters, in the tests it has worked excellently. I have segmented by area with VLANS so these will continue. In this way, I reduce the need to have a pppoe server with a high number of users. I have to run a PPPoE server for each VLAN or interface.