How does my home router work - wired & wireless?

Hardware Hub Networking
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I’m considering, and most likely will be, going the pfSense/OPNSense DIY router route so enamored of many in this community. I’ve been playing around with my home network, seeing what’s what before getting any additional hardware, and it’s raised some questions I’ve never even considered before. The big one is:

  • How does my Linksys common or garden consumer grade router combine the wireless and wired LANs in my network? I have both, naturally; I have laptops with wifi internet only and desktops with both wired and wireless NICs, usually with only the wired interface enabled. When I sniff connections I can see packets going between the wireless interface on the laptop to the wired interface on a desktop. But how? Is the router bridging the nets, or is it combining them electrically? Since I figure my router is just a standard piece of computing hardware (with a low power ARM processor) running off-the-shelf FOSS software for the most part that the answer should be contained in Linux (e.g.) already.

Both wired and wireless nets see my router as the standard 192.168.1.1 type of address. But there are two interfaces responding to that IP address. What’s going on inside the router? I can’t open it (logially, which is one reason I want to go to pfSense) to take a look!

So I’m considering how a pfSense type router handles this sort of thing. Will it bridge wifi and wired? How do I get wireless connectivity to a router that’s basically a PC running pfSense on FreeBSD? I presumed that the wireless network interface in the PC would work, but now I’m not so sure. Does there need to be some sort of wireless AP or base station (made by Ubiqiti e.g. or my current router repurposed)?

I’ve been googling and asking AI about this for the past couple of days but definitive answers seem pretty thin on the ground (i.e. I haven’t found them yet). I figured there must be networking/router professionals at this forum, or folks who have gone down the home router rabbit hole and have all manner of wired and wireless devices communicating with each other and the wider internet. I’m probably overthinking it as usual…

Thanks for any info!

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PS: I was looking at mini-PCs like the Minisforum MS-01 or MS-A1 or a Beelink 2 NIC system for my net appliance. I like the low power draw of these systems but they’re still a bit expensive and I prefer AMD chips if I’m going to be virtualizing (Proxmox, although someone with more expertise than me on the subject recommended bare metal) because heterogenous compute. That said, Alder Lake+ systems seem to work fine with virtualization from what I can tell (plenty of VMs!) I’m probably going to throw together a cheap AMD 5700G system for the network appliance, and not even put it in a case! (At least not until it’s buried under a layer of insulating dust.) I’m intending to do proof-of-concept spitballing on an i7-11700K system I have here. Any thoughts on hardware also welcome (I’ve watched quite a few YT vids on the subject of late, including many from Level1Techs, plus STH and others who are pro SFF PCs)

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Your router is acting like an ethernet hub for your local links. Don’t forget that WiFi is basically wireless ethernet.

You can do that with a Linux distribution: BridgeNetworkConnections - Debian Wiki

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Thanks, this may be what I am looking for. I figured some sort of bridge might be involved - I was looking into ip to link two interfaces together. I have to admit that ebtables are new to me. Presumably software like pfSense handles this sort of thing. I’ll have a play around with it on my test setup (running Debian).

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