Im setting up Pfsense at home.
I am going to be using two switches and Pfsense is installed on an olf dell with a 4 port nic in the back. Currently the modem and two switches are connected through this nic and I am having trouble getting both switches onto the network. The first switch is near my workhorse computer and the second in across the place near the tv and various devices in the living room area. In addition the TV has a UniFi WiFi device to deliver Wifi.
Pfsense seems to separate each switch and I can make a second interface for the second switch but then it gets problematic. I do not need these switches to be on separate networks and I wonder if I am missing a simple solution somewhere.
When I try to get a second interface going for the second switch the Track IP6 interface bites me in the rear. It seems you cannot have two different interfaces with the same IPv6 Prefix ID and the only IPv6 Prefix ID you can have is 0. So I cant choose 0 on the second one and I cant choose anything else. Disabling the IPv6 does not work as well.
Anyone gotten two switches working before? Will also need to get the WiFi up after I get that switch working.
bond the interfaces? or have them as different subnets where 192.168.1.0 is say your stuff by your workhorse and 192.168.1.1 is the other switch network. would make diagnosing connectivity issues slightly easier as you would know what switch is causing the trouble so might be the better option really. WiFi could even have its own network segment or just attach the AP to a switch
I got it working pluging the second switch into the first. Will work out something better later. Thank you. Probably go with different subnets.
Honestly that is the best solution. Pfsense is a router not a switch, even if you bridge the interfaces the performance won't be as good as just having he switches connected to each other.
Depend on what you call bad performance with bridging. I have a bridge running on a Intel C1037U which is basically a laptop Ivy Bridge cpu at 1.8 GHz and well it does 500/500 at about 30% Then again I don't have Snort nor Squid running. Sure it probably does impact it but it's not so horrible as some of those docs or people say and my guess the ruleset it's massive enough yet to really notice it.
The downside of Bridging is that if you add a new physical port to the brigde as in em1 has switch one and em2 has switch and you want to add switch 3 to em3 you will need to reboot pfsense. Sure you can already have em3 in the bridge list but then you get packet loss on em3 :) For some reason that isn't filtered out just so you know. In short adding a new physical port to the bridge list requires a reboot. Not that it's horrible to have 5 minutes of downtime ;)