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    Bridging Win7 Virtual AP into pfSense VM

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    • Z
      zachsaw
      last edited by

      I'm running pfSense in VMware server and been using it for my wired LAN clients for some time and it works perfectly.

      Now I'd like to create a wireless access point. I'm trying to use the Virtual Wifi of Win7 as an access point but without using Internet Connection Sharing. Instead, I want to have pfSense handle all my internet traffic and bridging the AP to my LAN (thus have my wireless clients share the same subnet as my wired LAN clients).

      On the Host-OS:
      Win7 Microsoft Virtual AP Adapter (bridged to vmnet2) - pfsense sees it as em1

      I managed to get as far as to have wired LAN clients communicating with all the wireless clients connected to the AP and vice versa. DHCP from pfSense works and I can see the DHCP lease having the correct MAC ID and all for the wireless clients.

      The problem though, is that I can't get internet access on the wireless clients. Ipconfig shows gateway and ip address to be correct (i.e. gateway is the pfsense ip 192.168.1.1 and ip address is in the same subnet as leased by pfsense's DHCP server). Nslookup works, but ping to google.com resolves the IP but no response. I suspect this is to do with the NAT / routing, but I have no idea how to debug. Wired LAN clients work fine though.

      Any help would be appreciated.

      This is my configuration for my pfSense running in vmware server:

      em0 LAN (vmnet0 - bridged to motherboard NIC)
      axe0 WAN (usb NIC)
      em1 OPT1 (vmnet2 - bridged)

      vmnet2's physical adapter on the host-OS (windows 7) is a "Microsoft Virtual Wifi Miniport Adapter" of which is running as an access point (wifi clients can connect to the access point no problem).

      In pfSense, I've added a firewall rule to allow any traffic from OPT1 to any destination (the most relaxed rule of * * * * *), and OPT1 is bridged to LAN (without this, I couldn't get to the wired LAN clients from the wireless client).

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