Bridged LAN ports on same subnet but can I….

[PhilJ]

Hey all

Completely hypothetical question, but lets say I have a research lab with 120 physical servers, all connected to 12 physical switches (10 servers to 1 switch), each switch having its own port on the pfSense box.

If all 12 LAN ports on the pfSense box are bridged and on the same subnet, is there a way to group servers like this:

Switch 1: 192.168.1.1
Switch 2: 192.168.2.1
Switch 3: 192.168.3.1
and so on…

Our researchers want to look at the DHCP leases and see what switches have less connections than they should.

Many thanks

Phil

[stephenw10]

I would guess no it's not possible.
You can only enable dhcp servers on static interfaces. In a bridge configuration usually only the bridge interface is static so you would have to use only one instance of DHCP for the whole subnet. There is no way of filtering leases by source interface, that I know of.
Alternatively you could have all the interfaces static, 192.168.1.1 2.1 3.1 etc, and still bridge them. If you had open firewall rules traffic could go between them. However you would run into some sort of subnet clash. You would want each dhcp server to hand out a subnet mask that included all the interfaces but you can only hand out the mask of the parent interface. Thus you would have to set the subnet masks of each interface to overlap all the interfaces. I don't know if pfSense will allow you to do that, I've always tried to avoid it  ;) Even if it does I would imagine routing problems. Perhaps it might work - hypothetically!

Steve