DHCP Implementation for Large WiFi Metro Area Network
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Hello, Im helping to design a city wide free wifi system to help our local community here in our small city in Philippines and i have some confusion about how DHCP and broadcast traffic behave with bridging and how to go about reducing the broadcast traffic in general.
General plan is:
we expect between 2000-4000 devices on this system and have the bandwidth to support it. Its totally out of the question to buy super expensive WAPS and other gear because its largely come about by donations; we have decent PCs to run pfSense, some intel nics, and maybe can get one or two managed switches if we needed VLANS or other features.Individual fiber runs are 1Gbps through the city and will probably connect to a 1gbps switch with a 2.5gig uplink port going pf or the fiber lines can put into groups going to different LAN ports on the pf server.
initially the plan is just use a /20 or /19 subnet for the whole area so users can roam about on our consumer grade WiFi6 APs. And it will probably work ok. But are there any simple hacks we can use to try to decrease broadcast traffic yet still have a single DHCP/network segment so devices can roam?
Like using VLANS or even physical adapters to share the same network segment across different physical segments?
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/bridges/internal-networks.html#dhcp-and-internal-bridges
This document seems to suggest that we might be able to use one DHCP server across a bridge of several nics but also block certain kinds of broadcast traffic using rules or it even doing that by default. is that so?
I dont see how VLANs would be useful because our WAPS dont support that and other usages of VLANS ultimately need to be bridged together. I thought about using a DHCP relay but pf doesnt seem to allow DHCP relaying while also being a DHCP server.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.