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    Home IP Address Scheme Change Q's

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    34 Posts 9 Posters 7.7k Views
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    • johnpozJ Online
      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
      last edited by

      The wiki is pretty much open to anyone, request an account have at updating it ;)

      To be honest, if you can not just look at the gui in pfsense and figure out the basics – then maybe you shouldn't even be using pfsense in the first place..

      Pretty much every single option has some note on it, etc.  Most pages if you click the ? in the upper right takes you to docs - for example the firewall rules page ? takes you to
      https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Firewall_Rule_Basics

      When click to create a rule - pretty much every single option has notes on it, etc. etc..

      An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
      If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
      Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
      SG-4860 25.07.1 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07.1

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      • S Offline
        SilverJS
        last edited by

        You're right, and the more I play around with pfSense, the more I'm seeing that too.  I was referring to OpenVPN more specifically, where I had to tool around with third party guides (one in particular was excellent), that went a fair ways past what the wizard did.  But hey - I accept that this is part of open-source.  FreeNAS was/is the same, to a large extent, but like I said, its documentation is (now) a fair bit better, I believe.

        In any case, I am enjoying pfSense more and more as I tool around with it, and this community so far has been awesome.

        pfSense Rig : SuperMicro X8SIL-F with X3430 Xeon CPU, Shuriken cooler | 12 Gb ECC RAM | Kingston 64GB SSD | Antec VP450 P/S | Silverstone ML03B Case

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        • johnpozJ Online
          johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
          last edited by

          I would not look to 3rd party guides - they are almost always nonsense and out dated.. If you have questions on how openvpn works - I would consult the actual documentation from openvpn.

          I have never had issue with setting up pfsense for openvpn just running thru the wizard.  Click, click done and up and running.

          An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
          If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
          Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
          SG-4860 25.07.1 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07.1

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          • D Offline
            deinspanjer
            last edited by

            This thread was great as I've been contemplating the same thing as I wrangle my home office LAN into shape with my new pfSense router.

            One thing I'm curious about that I didn't see specifically being called out, why subdivide your network into such small partitions like this:
            1: pfSense +
            2-14 : Network Devices (x.x.x.0/29)
            17-30 : Servers (x.x.x.16/29)
            33-62 : Statics (x.x.x.32/28)
            65-78 : Printers (x.x.x.64/28)
            81-94 : IoT (x.x.x.80/28)
            97-110 : A/V (x.x.x.96/28)
            129-190 : DHCP Range (x.x.x.128/26)
            193-222 : Jails (x.x.x.192/27)
            225-254 : Reserved (x.x.x.224/27)

            instead of just using a separate class C err.. /16 for each use case?
            I'm wondering if it might because of problems broadcasting or multicasting, but I thought that if you specified the subnet mask as 255.255.0.0, it would make those able to propagate through the whole network..

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            • D Offline
              divsys
              last edited by

              instead of just using a separate class C err.. /16 for each use case?
              I'm wondering if it might because of problems broadcasting or multicasting, but I thought that if you specified the subnet mask as 255.255.0.0, it would make those able to propagate through the whole network..

              You could do that if you wished and in some cases it would be desirable (larger enterprise/many user setups) but for home use it gets a little awkward pretty fast.
              There's something nice about only having to remember the last octet of a network address to specify your printer or Xbox, etc.

              The other consideration is when you try and connect to other networks that aren't under your control (VPN, etc.)
              Assigning yourself an (overly) large block makes it that more likely you'll be stepping on someone else's subnet and cause yourself routing headaches.

              The breakdown suggested is pretty thorough - in many home setups too thorough.
              I would guess most people could easily get away with only a DHCP, Static, and "other" section given that 40 network devices in a home network is a "big" number.
              Indeed I'm sure many people just leave it at DHCP and don't worry too much about the rest.

              As always it's up to you how intricate you want to make this:  Design==Choices.

              Please note, I'm definitely NOT knocking SilverJS's effort at structuring his (her?) network.
              On the contrary as I said earlier, it's refreshing to see someone think about where their design choices will take them - before they have to say oooops  ;)

              Just my $.02, YMMV.

              -jfp

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              • johnpozJ Online
                johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                last edited by

                Its a home network not sure why anyone would worry about it.. How many printers are you realistically going to have?  For that many how many possible devices do you have?  If want to have different segments for say wifi and or say specific types of devices then just create a new segment on different vlan, etc.

                For example my normal lan is 192.168.9.0/24 wifi network is 192.168.2.0/24, I have a guest wifi that is on 192.168.4.0/24..  I have ps3 for example on is own isolated vlan 92.168.5.0/24 I have a vm dmz segment of 192.168.3.0/24

                Breaking up a /24 for specific types of devices would be great idea if were limited to your 1 /24 that was assigned to you by corp or something.  But in a home its just kind of waste of time to break it up into such details.. Not like your limited in how many networks you can have.. You have all of rfc1918 space at your disposal why your breaking up a /24 is silly.

                An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                SG-4860 25.07.1 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07.1

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                • S Offline
                  SilverJS
                  last edited by

                  Maybe it is - but hey, the OCD in me kinda likes it. =)  Plus, honestly, it was about learning networks and such.  I'm glad I've done it.  Ultimately, I'll never ever fill up all the network slots, I know, and it was beyond overkill, I know that too. But it was fun!  I enjoyed just sitting down and plotting this in Excel, planning this out, learning about CIDR and such.

                  I'm actually thinking about further breakin gdown the "server" segment into two /29 segments (lol!) - one for the servers themselves, and the other for the IPMI interfaces.

                  pfSense Rig : SuperMicro X8SIL-F with X3430 Xeon CPU, Shuriken cooler | 12 Gb ECC RAM | Kingston 64GB SSD | Antec VP450 P/S | Silverstone ML03B Case

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                  • johnpozJ Online
                    johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                    last edited by

                    While guess this is good practice..  As you stated its overkill and your over complicating what should be a very simple network..  I really would just break it out to multiple vlans and practice that way if you want to use /27 or whatever on your vlans have at it.. But just playing with ip space in the same segment is not really all that helpful unless you want to create some specific firewall rules for those machines on those IPs.

                    Which you could do as well if they were their own vlans and or segments on /24 to make it to read for humans.

                    An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                    If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                    Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                    SG-4860 25.07.1 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07.1

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                    • S Offline
                      SilverJS
                      last edited by

                      I'll have to admit to not being that knowledgeable about VLANs (yet! - it's my next area of inquiry), but what is the advantage, for the average home user, of VLANs over something like what I am doing?

                      pfSense Rig : SuperMicro X8SIL-F with X3430 Xeon CPU, Shuriken cooler | 12 Gb ECC RAM | Kingston 64GB SSD | Antec VP450 P/S | Silverstone ML03B Case

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                      • johnpozJ Online
                        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                        last edited by

                        well they are actually different networks so you can actually firewall between them.  Your just using specific ips inside 1 network for different things.  Buys you pretty much nothing, other than maybe ability to group ips for firewall rules to the internet currently.  Which you could do with aliases anyway.

                        To be honest I see no point to what your doing other than making what IPs your devices get more complicated ;)  and possible breaking of your own rules when you maybe picked out wrong number of ips you wanted for specific types of devices.

                        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                        SG-4860 25.07.1 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07.1

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