WG not routing or sending traffic
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Been almost 2 weeks now so thought I'd make one last update to this thread.
I have everything working. Just a few headline PSA's from my perspective for people who just skim the rest of the posts
- Reducing the MSS on the LAN interface is vitally important as without it certain URL's would not work. I reduced it to 1412 (per my ISP guidance) and it's been perfect ever since
- You can't add a new network interface in VMWare while pfSense is running as it breaks the networking when you reboot pfSense
- pfSense seemingly has no easy way of monitoring what's going on with the WG tunnel including no easy way to see if the tunnel is actually up or being negotiated other than pinging the far side gateway
- I suspect pfSense' WG implementation is not yet completely stable as there's a lot of niggly issues being reported in this thread with "odd" behaviour
- It doesn't matter whether you use policy based routing to encrypt all and PBR the unencrypted (as I have mine) or use PBR to only encrypt certain traffic - both work
- I never did get any word back from Netgate on whether this is a bug or known/expected behaviour
Now it's actually working it's rock stable and hasn't dropped a connection yet (which is something OpenVPN was doing on a daily basis for me). It's clearly a little faster than OpenVPN but that might just be my imagination.
Again a huge thanks to @dma_pf and others for their contribution.
G
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@xxgbhxx Thanks for the update! I was wondering how things worked out for you and I'm really glad it's all good now.
Here's a suggestion based on our conversation.
You might want to create an interface group to another server or 2 of IVPN's. It's really to do. Just duplicate all that you've done to create the interface you have already made to IVPN (interface, routing, NAT, firewall rules) but use a different IVPN server.
When it's all done bind the interfaces together in System/Routing/Gateway Groups then use that interface group in your rules to route your traffic out the interface group. This will keep your internet up if one of the servers you are connected to goes down for any reason.
I'd use a servers from different data center providers for each connection (datapacket, M247) to provide another level of fail safe protection. Maybe one across the channel? IVPN gives you up to 7 simultaneous connections.
(Bonus Tip: Ping to different servers and see where your fastest responses come from. In my case I get quicker responses, and consistently faster speed tests, from 2 servers that are about 200 miles from me, as opposed to one only 60 miles away. Don't assume that the closest servers are going provide the fastest services. It all depends on the routing out on the net).
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@dma_pf said in WG not routing or sending traffic:
@xxgbhxx Thanks for the update! I was wondering how things worked out for you and I'm really glad it's all good now.
Here's a suggestion based on our conversation.
You might want to create an interface group to another server or 2 of IVPN's. It's really to do. Just duplicate all that you've done to create the interface you have already made to IVPN (interface, routing, NAT, firewall rules) but use a different IVPN server.
When it's all done bind the interfaces together in System/Routing/Gateway Groups then use that interface group in your rules to route your traffic out the interface group. This will keep your internet up if one of the servers you are connected to goes down for any reason.
I'd use a servers from different data center providers for each connection (datapacket, M247) to provide another level of fail safe protection. Maybe one across the channel? IVPN gives you up to 7 simultaneous connections.
(Bonus Tip: Ping to different servers and see where your fastest responses come from. In my case I get quicker responses, and consistently faster speed tests, from 2 servers that are about 200 miles from me, as opposed to one only 60 miles away. Don't assume that the closest servers are going provide the fastest services. It all depends on the routing out on the net).
That's exactly what I did last week. ;)
I also set up and configured Squid and Snort.
This weekend I do DNSBL in pfBlockerNG then I'm done for a while :)
Many thanks for the tip though :)
G
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@xxgbhxx Just thought I'd do a very quick update.
It happened to me again today and I've finally nailed EXACTLY what the issue was/is and it turns out it was an already known issue with VMWare/PfSense (gee thanks Netgate).
The issue is with VMWares allocation of NIC's. In VMware when you add new nics they number them vmx0 vmx1 vmx2 and so on. When you add a new card for some completely inexplicable reason, VMWare numbers the NEW card vmx0 and then bumps up the interface numbers of all the other cards (so what WAS vmx0 becomes vmx1). This immediately breaks pfSense and pretty much means you have to re-do all your interfaces and firewalls.
SO
The moral here is add as many interfaces from day one as you ever expect to use and if you DO decide to any later on, make sure you fully prep for the impact (because remembering interface names/locations from 9 months ago is not easy!)
Thought I'd leave this here in case anyone has the same issue.