pfSense, VLANs, and CenturyLink PPPoE (Oh my!)

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chrismetcalf

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Mar 16, 2017
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I've got CenturyLink fiber to the home gigabit, and I'm trying to not use their crappy rental router. I'm attempting to set up a pfSense firewall/router in a VM on FreeNAS 11.1-U6, but I'm stuck.

CenturyLink's fiber _could_ be as simple as just hooking up a cat-6 to the TNC, but they like to make it hard on us poor home networking people:
  • The packets on the WAN connection to the TNC have to be on a VLAN tagged 201
  • For some inexplicable reason you need to connect via PPPoE
These two together rule out most normal router hardware - I had a nice setup using AdvanceTomato that allowed me to use VLAN tagging before, but there aren't many routers with hardware powerful enough to PPPoE at gigabit speeds.

So here's what I've got so far:
  • FreeNAS 11.1-U6 running on a great, well-baked home NAS with a SuperMicro motherboard with dual ethernet ports. Since I'd heard some stuff about onboard ethernet ports not always VLANing properly, I added a Netgear PCI-E gigabit card for my WAN port
  • In FreeNAS, I created a new VLAN tagging that new interface 201, which I called "vlan201". I assigned no DHCP or IP information to that new interface
  • To my VM, I added a new NIC using vlan201 and the Intel interface type
  • In pfSense, I created a new VLAN using my WAN interface tagging it 201. That created an "em1.201" interface
  • I then created a new PPPoE config using em1.201 as the interface, using my known-good CenturyLink PPPoE credentials
  • I then assigned that PPPoE connection "PPPOE0(em.201)" as my WAN interface
As best I can tell, this should all be correct. But when pfSense tries to connect with PPPoE, it times out over and over. I _think_ this is the VLAN tagging not working, but I can't for the life of me figure out where I might have gone wrong there.

Anybody have any ideas of what I might change or test?
 

Nvious1

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Jul 12, 2018
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I would try only tagging either the physical nic on freenas side and just let the VM go untagged or vice versa. By tagging the traffic on both could be causing issues.

Do you know if the connection from your fiber Jack is expecting your connection point to be a trunk of more than one vlan?

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
 

chrismetcalf

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Mar 16, 2017
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I would try only tagging either the physical nic on freenas side and just let the VM go untagged or vice versa. By tagging the traffic on both could be causing issues.

I swear I've tried that, but I'll try that again, there's some logic to it.

Do you know if the connection from your fiber Jack is expecting your connection point to be a trunk of more than one vlan?

Pretty sure its just the one VLAN, I only had one in my old setup.
 
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