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    Enhance interface gateway data entry descriptions

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    • P
      phil.davis
      last edited by

      Re: https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/903
      There have been a lot of people recently on the forum who have felt the urge to enter a gateway on LAN. So this is my suggestion for changing the wording of the prompts and GUI to try to help people to make the right decision. I am looking for comments on whether this seems a reasonable way to go, and if there are other suggestions for the wording. We do not want to fill the user interface with too many words, but we do need to get the message across.

      As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
      If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        I'm definitely behind this, there seem to have been a whole run of people putting gateways where there should be none.
        It seems most common when users have had to choose none default settings for LAN at the initial console config.

        Reading through your patches I think they would certainly eliminate most of the recent problems. It does seem to imply that no gateway should ever be allowed but then why have the ability to enter it at all? Potentially confusing. There are some situations when you might want to enter a gateway. Admittedly very rare and you'd really want to know you needed it. Maybe we could word it:
        On local networks the upstream gateway should almost always be "none".
        The other thing that seems potentially confusing to me is referring to LANs and WANs when they are also the names of specific interfaces. Maybe we could refer to them as internal and external networks or local and remote networks, I'm not sure. It seems like someone might still enter a gateway on an interface labelled OPT1, for example, because it isn't labelled LAN.

        Just some suggestions. I agree the wording should be changed in some way.

        Also I see you've changed the spelling of Ermal's name to Luci but isn't it supposed to be spelt Luçi? Unicode not appearing correctly in Github.  ;)

        Steve

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        • P
          phil.davis
          last edited by

          Also I see you've changed the spelling of Ermal's name to Luci but isn't it supposed to be spelt Luçi? Unicode not appearing correctly in Github

          When I use online GitHub and copy to Notepad++, edit then paste back into the online GitHUb editor, the special character in "Luci" goes missing along the way. Will have to be careful not to paste the whole file back into the editor. If I leave the top lines untouched in the editor then I expect it will preserve Ermal's name correctly for posterity.
          We don't want to offend Ermal - we will be lost without all those system/driver/port patches.  ;)

          As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
          If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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          • P
            phil.davis
            last edited by

            It seems like someone might still enter a gateway on an interface labelled OPT1, for example, because it isn't labelled LAN.

            If OPT1 is their 2nd WAN then they do want to enter a gateway.
            Anyway, my suggestion got committed today (and not to an asylum), so see what it looks like on the next 2.1.1-prerelease build. Yes, the LAN and WAN thing could be a little confusing because Local Area Network and Wide Area Network are generic computing terms (to which I am referring to suggest what to do on LAN-style and WAN-style interfaces), and they are the particular special names of 2 interfaces in pfSense.

            As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
            If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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            • stephenw10S
              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
              last edited by

              Great. This is definitely a step in the right direction even it could use some further refining later. It isn't going to confuse anyone who already understands the situation and it will probably eliminate most of the incorrect gateway issues for people who don't.

              Steve

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