Backhaul
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I am not sure why you are using floating rules - that is where the confusion about In/Out is coming from, floating rules let you apply the rule on traffic coming In or Out of an Interface, there is also the terminology of In/Out for limiters - a different place in the GUI and different thing.
I think you really want:
- Static route on each pfSense pointing to its local Cisco for a route to the subnet behind the Cisco.
- Do not do any NAT on the "WAN" backhaul interfaces - perhaps just make those ordinary LAN-style interfaces (no Upstream Gateway defined)
- Gateway defined for the IP address on the other side of each "WAN" backhaul link.
- Gateway group/s that include the 2 gateways with whatever tiers you want to make it load-balance or fail-over.
- Pass rule/s on the LAN interface to pass traffic source: the subnet behind the Cisco (and the local pfSense LAN subnet for completeness), destination: the subnet behind remote end Cisco (and the remote end pfSense LAN subnet for completeness), gateway: the gateway group you made.
- Pass rule/s on the WAN backhaul interfaces to allow incoming traffic from the other end (or just allow all to get it going).
(These "pass" rules on individual interfaces are "In" rules - you do not get a choice about that - they will apply to traffic flows initiated from the interface they are on)
It should all work in a conceptually similar way to having a couple of site-to-site VPN tunnels between pfSense systems and routing intranet traffic across them.
Thanks, I will try this out. What Derelict recommended may work, I need to go to the remote site and fix/replace the remote pfsense box. It gets stuck in the shutdown process when restarting. I got sick last week and took time off so I haven't gotten around to it yet. I will try both and respond back with the results.
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I am not sure why you are using floating rules - that is where the confusion about In/Out is coming from, floating rules let you apply the rule on traffic coming In or Out of an Interface, there is also the terminology of In/Out for limiters - a different place in the GUI and different thing.
I think you really want:
- Static route on each pfSense pointing to its local Cisco for a route to the subnet behind the Cisco.
- Do not do any NAT on the "WAN" backhaul interfaces - perhaps just make those ordinary LAN-style interfaces (no Upstream Gateway defined)
- Gateway defined for the IP address on the other side of each "WAN" backhaul link.
- Gateway group/s that include the 2 gateways with whatever tiers you want to make it load-balance or fail-over.
- Pass rule/s on the LAN interface to pass traffic source: the subnet behind the Cisco (and the local pfSense LAN subnet for completeness), destination: the subnet behind remote end Cisco (and the remote end pfSense LAN subnet for completeness), gateway: the gateway group you made.
- Pass rule/s on the WAN backhaul interfaces to allow incoming traffic from the other end (or just allow all to get it going).
(These "pass" rules on individual interfaces are "In" rules - you do not get a choice about that - they will apply to traffic flows initiated from the interface they are on)
It should all work in a conceptually similar way to having a couple of site-to-site VPN tunnels between pfSense systems and routing intranet traffic across them.
Thanks, I will try this out. What Derelict recommended may work, I need to go to the remote site and fix/replace the remote pfsense box. It gets stuck in the shutdown process when restarting. I got sick last week and took time off so I haven't gotten around to it yet. I will try both and respond back with the results.
After doing my testing, I got the setup working. Used this as the guide and it does work. The pfsense box is deployed on 1 end, the end which was in need of being replaced. Had a few issues which needed to be resolved as we have several networks to join up and allow traffic to, however they are not critical to business processes, only critical for IT and some small use cases for some users. They are resolved afaik, guess I'll find out when something doesn't work and someone complains about it to me.
A big thank you to phil.davis and Derelict for the helpful input. I learned a lot through the input from you two. Also thanks to the others who gave input, promoting useful discussion of this topic.
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One issue I've been seeing is that sometimes pings will not resolve going across the wifi link between the pfsense and opposite linux box. The ping is going from client to server or server to client, both do not resolve, and not all clients experience the problems. They are on the same network.
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What does "resolve" mean in the context of using ping/icmp?
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What does "resolve" mean in the context of using ping/icmp?
requests time out. Also, if a gateway goes down in a group, clients that were once able to ping, can no longer ping.
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well this may be unnecessary. I replaced the box on this side with a pfsense box and the timeouts stopped. It may have been an issue with the linux box on this side. Will post with updates after it's been running overnight.
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One question I have is how do I give this box access to the internet? Normally you would have a wan connected to the internet, but this is routing for a private network. Do I need to create policy routing?
pfsense box [LAN port 10.2] –-- [10.1 WiFi backhaul port] Cisco [to external IP]
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NAT for 10.2 on the Cisco. Set pfSense's default gateway to 10.1 and configure DNS, etc.
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Also, if you're pinging across a load-balanced link and the link your state is on goes down, your ping will stop because the state doesn't move to the other circuit. Stopping and restarting the ping should result in pings again as a new state is created using the other link.
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Also, if you're pinging across a load-balanced link and the link your state is on goes down, your ping will stop because the state doesn't move to the other circuit. Stopping and restarting the ping should result in pings again as a new state is created using the other link.
Which is what I tried to do, however the machiens would still not return a ping. I tried even resetting the states within the pfsense box, but nothing happened. There are some issues with the linux boxes we are replacing, and this seems to be one of them. After switching out both ends, compared to only 1 end, pings have been very stable. A lot of the routing it should be doing, doesn't seem to be done. The interface will say one thing, but it will do something else completely. We also have little control over the backend of the linux box.
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well this may be unnecessary. I replaced the box on this side with a pfsense box and the timeouts stopped. It may have been an issue with the linux box on this side. Will post with updates after it's been running overnight.
Well things have been running smoothly for the past few days, things are looking good.