I have silly noobish question.
I’m playing with some homelab stuff, and decided to play with pfsense. I completely switched to the pfsense to be the default gateway and dhcp. My wifi router is now basically just an access point. So what happens if I need to shut down that pfsense server? Am I screwed? I won’t be able to get to the ESXi host anymore because the router is down. Would I have to pull an old router out of the closet and set it up temporarily?
Plug your router into a switch, that way you won’t lose local connectivity if it goes down.
It is plugged into a switch. I guess I need a layer 3 switch huh? I might be able to get my hands on one.
Not at all, a L2 switch will keep your LAN up. You just won’t be able to get to the internet.
You could set IP addresses manually or have a DHCP server run on something other than PFSense.
They’ll all keep their DHCPed addresses until rebooted anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it.