VMWare vlan works, web GUI hangs
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Hi All,
I am testing a pfsense installation on a VMWare 2.0 Virtual Machine. I am trying to get Vlans working in the pfsense guest. The pfsense guest has 1 bridged interface (le0) with 2 vlans configured (id 5 at vlan0 and 10 at vlan1). I have then configured vlan0 as the LAN interface and vlan1 as the WAN. When I attach a client machine on the LAN (off my switch) I get a DHCP address from pfsense of 192.168.1.199 and I can ping the pfsense host at 192.168.1.1. From the shell in pfsense I can also ping 192.168.1.199 (client machine). So it seems everything is working. The problem I am having is when I login to the web interface at http://192.168.1.1 I get a login prompt and can successfully login but the screen hangs after that and I never get the initial wizard to show up. dmesg on the pfsense guest shows the le0 and vlan0 interfaces are both up. I have checked /var/log/filer, system, lighthttpd.error and user logs and I don't see any messages produced that indicate a problem.
When I load the web GUI this is the response I see in firebug
Response Headersview source Transfer-Encoding chunked X-Powered-By PHP/4.4.7 Expires 0 Last-Modified Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:40:03 GMT Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma no-cache Content-Type text/html Date Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:40:03 GMT Server lighttpd/1.4.18Request Headersview source Host 192.168.1.1 User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11 FirePHP/0.4 Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive 115 Connection keep-alive Authorization Basic YWRtaW46cGZzZW5zZQ=="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <title><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"<br /> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><br /><html><br /><head><br /> <title></pre><br /><br />The page basically loads up to the title tag and the browser hangs waiting for the rest of the response, which never comes. <br /><br />To make sure it wasn't a distro specific issue I have tested this using the liveCD for 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 all with more or less the same result. 1.2.2 loads the entire html doc but hangs on the images, css and js files for the page.<br /><br />Also, I can ssh into the pfSense guest from my client machine. So Web GUI no-go, ssh all good.<br /><br />Has anyone out there come across this kind of problem before? It seems everything is working except I can't get the web admin to load.<br /><br />Any help would be greatly appreciated.<br /><br />Thanks<br /><br />–b</title> -
ok, after much digging I have found the problem. The problem is VMWare Server 2.0 does not support bridging vlan frames to a virtual interface. If that's what you want you are going to us VMWare ESX and configure a vSwitch to handle that.
Since I'm a cheap son-of-a-b*tch and want to use the free version of VMWare I have to configure my vlan interfaces on the host os and let the host handle the tagging. Then create the host os vlan interfaces as bridged interfaces on the guest. So no vlans run native on the guest (pfsense).
This is all referenced here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,9292.0.html
I did not use the e1000 interface as VMWare claims (in the web config interface) that this is known to cause problems on BSD. I have no idea of the validity of this but I seem to be working ok without it.
Cheers and thanks to all on IRC for chiming in on this.