Help setting up single-NIC box
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First off, Hello everyone and thanx for providing this impressive tool.
Let me just say that i am a user of very basic knowledge on the following stuff and i am struggling to get the hang of it.I decided to turn my old asus EEE laptop into a pfsense machine. I am running pfsense embedded with vga booting from a SD card. Here's my problem:
When booting and setting the only port of my machine to WAN, i can access the webGUI from my network.
Unfortunately, the machine has only one NIC so, after reading for a while, it seems i need to set up a vLAN in order to use the NIC both as WAN and LAN1. That's what i cannot figure out. When i create two new adaptors, say ath0_vlan10 and ath0_vlan20, (using either dhcp or static IPs) i lose connectivity to the network. I cannot access the webgui, cannot ping the pfsense machine and cannot ping the rest of the network from the pfsense machine.
(I have rebooted all network machines multiple times - after reading some posts here)Am i missing something important?
At start i was connecting the pfsense machine to a simple unmanaged switch, then after reading some more, i pluged in directly to my router. From what i understand for the single NIC to work both as WAN and LAN, some setting is required switch/router side (or not?). So i plugged it directly to my router, which is a TL-WR941ND flashed with a mini version of dd-wrt.
Is my router/dd-wrt enough to co-operate with the pfsense machine?
Is there some setting required router-side?Am i totally lost and babbling out of context? :)
Finally, i tried to get past this whole vlan issue using a USB NIC i got of ebay (unbranded usb2 to Gigabit). I do get a message when plugging it into the pfsense box (SMSC connected on usbus - or something) but i cannot seem to be able to use it as an actual adapter.
Any tips on this front?Any help/tips/reading material will be greatly appreciated, as i have exhausted my choices, dont have anything else to try.
Again, keep in mind that these are my first steps into non-basic networking so, bare with me please :)Thank you in avance,
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In order to get the VLAN solution working properly, you're going to need a VLAN capable switch of some kind.
Once you moved away from a "Single NIC" installation, your pfSense would have firewalls rules like a more traditional setup, WAN blocked and LAN allowing outgoing.
So you need a running VLAN switch to be able to connect into the box.As far as the USB NIC approach, they're pretty hit and miss in general, it doesn't surprise me that one model doesn't appear at all. If you search the forums you'll see that it's something of a crap shoot finding a workable model, lots of junk out there.
You're probably better off finding a reasonable VLAN switch and working forward from there.
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Thank you for your reply divsys,
In order to get the VLAN solution working properly, you're going to need a VLAN capable switch of some kind.
Can a router with dd-wrt software opearte as a managed switch? or am i far from it?
Once you moved away from a "Single NIC" installation, your pfSense would have firewalls rules like a more traditional setup, WAN blocked and LAN allowing outgoing.
did "pfctl -d" isnt this supposed to drop all firewalls?
the USB NIC approach, they're pretty hit
I was hoping that the fact that i get the message on connection was a good sign, isn't it?
You're probably better off finding a reasonable VLAN switch and working forward from there.
Im probably better off buying a more appropriate pfsense machine, but the whole point was to utilize stuff laying around :)
thanks again