Netgate 4200 -> Linksys N600 wireless bridge -> Starlink wifi
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I would like to be able to connect my entire wired LAN to the internet through my Starlink. Since the Starlink router only has a wifi interface for clients I am attempting to use a Linksys N600 in wireless bridge mode to route wired ethernet traffic from its 4 LAN ports over the wifi bridge. Plugging my iMac directly into the Linksys via ethernet cable works perfectly (sending this to you now through that connection).
I have also setup my Netgate with a WAN port on ethernet port 1 and connected that to my cable modem. This also works for reaching the internet:iMac -> Netgate -> cable modem.
No problems there.
So now I'm trying to figure out how to get that WAN port connected to the Linksys and traffic routed out through Starlink. From the diagnostics menu I can ping the Starlink router at the address 192.168.1.1, but cannot reach any hosts on the internet from the Netgate. Of course no traffic from the iMac reaches the internet either.
The Netgate is getting an address via DHCP from the Starlink router; 192.168.1.25.My iMac appears to be getting DHCP configuration from the Netgate which includes the router as being the Netgate's address of 192.168.1.6.
I'm ultimately hoping to have a dual WAN failover setup that would prioritize my cable modem, and fail over to Starlink when the cable goes down.
Am I lacking a router or gateway configuration that would tell the Netgate to take all LAN originating traffic destined for the internet and to send it through the Linksys on its way to the Starlink router at 192.168.1.1?
I'm sure I've left out pertinent details so please feel free to ask questions. Thanks in advance everyone for your help.
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@hixson What IP subnet are you using on pfsense?? It will not work if you have the same 192.168.1.0/24 on WAN as you have on LAN. If you have already spent time in setting up pfsense, I suggest you change on the starlink router to e.g. 192.168.N.0/24
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@Gblenn Thanks for that suggestion. Unfortunately it looks like the Starlink router is hardcoded to 192.168.1.0/24 so I changed my pfsense setup to use 192.168.2.0/24. That's working!
Now I've got to change all my LAN devices to be on the new subnet and then I'll try setting up failover between my two WANs.
Thanks!
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@hixson About your devices, do you mean you set their IP's manually on each device? Or do you mean that you have set static IP's from the pfsense DHCP server? Otherwise, they should all just pick up a new IP from pfsense when you reboot them, or restart their interfaces.
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@Gblenn Most of my devices will get an address via DHCP and be just fine. I have a couple machines (mail server, web server, etc) that are port forwarded from my cable modem's static IP. I just need to change those to the 192.168.2.x subnet and set up the same port forwarding rules in pfsense. I don't foresee any problems there.
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@hixson Aha, yes it would be quite nice if there was a function to make that change automagically when you change the IP on an interface. I have more than 50 static IP's that I have mapped up for my AP's, switches, VM's, and whole bunch of devices, like Chromecast, doorlock, cameras, phones, laptops etc. Would be quite a bit of work to change all of them...
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@Gblenn said in Netgate 4200 -> Linksys N600 wireless bridge -> Starlink wifi:
if there was a function to make that change automagically when you change the IP on an interface. I have more than 50 static IP's that I have mapped
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It's not automated like that, but, it won't take you '5 minutes' to do so.
Conditions upfront :
Never ever set any static IP settings on any device, even if these are 'server' type devices.
Use the "pfSense MAC static DHCP lease" for every device. No need to setup each device, nor even touching it : as soonas you 'see' the MAC address on the wire, make a DHCP static Lease setup, and done for the exitence of that device in your LAN network.Now the moment has arrived you have to 'shift' everybody to another network because some stupid ISP upstream router hard-codes it's LAN network.
Ok ... set your pfSense LAN interface to a new network, let's call it 192.168.2.1/24.Export the pfSense config file.
Use your favorite text editor, like Notepad++
"Search and replace" (click 50 times) in the DHCP server section all the occurrences of your DHCP Static Leases from 192.168.1.x to 192.168.2.x
save.
Import your config.
Done.You'll see, it's easy.
Btw : the Starlink router has only a Wifi access ? Are you sure ? Isn't there a version with a RJ45 ? IMHO : get a router with Rj45 - and Wifi is optional. In that order.
There are many posts on this forum where the WAN port of pfSense is hooked up to the starlink router, NOT using some Wifi bridge device making the connection even more complex.
The starlink router has still some goatcha's, strange WAN issues that can be handled, as it behave (afaik) as a cable modem. The oens who have dealt with these will feel at home right away but I guess, if you have to take starlink, you have never seen cable, ADSL or fiber, neither 4G/5G and it that case it isn't a real plug and play experience they offer. -
