Pfsense as a wireless client(bridge)
-
I am currently bridging my house and my mother's house together with two D-Link DWL-2100AP access points, to save her on paying for her own internet. This worked great while there was only one computer there, but after adding a couple more I ran into an issue. The D-link will not remain stable when passing traffic from multiple MAC addresses. In default setup it will only assign one IP through bridged client mode, but I found a way to change it to accept multiple MAC address assignments through a telnet command. Well it will assign IP addresses to all the computers there, but when traffic starts to pass through the bridge it crashes repeatedly. I put a router at her house and set the bridge back to default so it only sees the router as passing traffic, one IP instead of five. Now I have to double NAT in order to remote access a computer there from outside my network. I could go on and on about the headaches this has caused besides remote access, but I'm sure you can imagine what they are.
The solution I am trying, and failing, to implement is to use another pfsense box with a wireless card to act as the wireless client. I would like to eliminate the D-link bridge at her house and have the pfsense box connect to my AP. Is this at all possible or am I just being hopeful? I have tried to use the wireless interface as a WAN with the interface set to Infrastructure, but nothing I tried worked as of yet. Any help I can get on this would save me some more headaches.
-
What is running on the d-links? dd-wrt in client bridge mode supports multiple IP addresses just fine.
-
Right now they are running the d-link firmware. They are not officially supported by dd-wrt yet unfortunately. I have been making do with the proprietary crap for a few years. I would love to get Pfsense to work in this setup since it just works for everything else.
-
Honestly, how much is your time worth? You only need to replace one unit: the one at her house. You can get a wrt54g or somesuch for like $50 and flash it with non-crap firmware.
-
While I don't want to sound ungrateful for the help, I am aware that I can just replace the hardware with something else and solve the problem. What I have is an existing pfsense firewall at her house and would like to just use that. If it will be more trouble than it's worth I will just go with a different bridge set. Thank you for the suggestion anyway.
-
Do you want to bridge the pfSense?
You can only bridge the wireless interface if it is in access-point mode.
So you would have to run the AP on the pfSenses side, or set up a routed network (which is imo more proper than a bridged scenario).
