Using A USB Wireless Dongle In A Jail

[House Of Cards]

Setting up HomeAssistant, and all of my home automation devices use there own wireless network which is not the network my NAS is using. Is it possible to use a USB wireless stick and connect the jails internet to that device? This way the jail sees all the other devices on that network...

Any advice would be great.

 

[sretalla]

Don't think of the idea in terms of a dongle in a jail... what you will do is have a network on your FreeNAS system and then attach the jail to that network... the jail needs to know nothing about dongles.

What that implies is that you need to get a wireless network card to run in the FreeNAS host.

I have not personally done that, but I recall seeing it mentioned around the forums... I'm sure a bit of searching will get you to a suitable card/solution.

 

[House Of Cards]

Makes sense. I don't suppose anybody knows of a USB Wireless stick that will work out of the box? It's not doing anything high speed. I just want a stable wifi connection for the server.

Looking through the HCL makes me dizzy.

 

[Jailer]

Wireless support in FreeBSD is horrible. You'd be better off setting up a separate network that is wired on your FreeNAS machine and using another source such as an AP to get your wireless clients connected rather than trying to get wireless working on FreeNAS itself.

 

[House Of Cards]

I've heard that. LOL

It's all been interesting, but little by little, we're getting there. I have a Nortek USB dongle that supports what I want and FreeNAS recognizes it. It "sees" Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, and I just figured I'd do the same to get it to "see" the wifi devices.

I get the point, but I already have a PFSense machine with 4 port NIC. One port has an AP running the home network, and another port hosts an AP that provides wifi specific to home automation stuff. That stuff is too fractured and insecure, and this allows some isolation of things like my smart lighting from the regular LAN. So basically, I already have a mesh wifi network for the automation, I just need to connect the jail to it.

I'd like to avoid adding other networks. I've got a few already. :D

Anything I do with this dongle will only need to send small amounts of control packets for automation devices. Nothing fast or efficient is required. Just basic wifi connectivity. Transfers will be a couple hundred KB/second when it's busy.

 

[Jailer]

You misunderstand my response. Set up an AP as a wireless client and use that to connect to your existing network. Then connect to the AP via the LAN port on FreeNAS. The AP will provide the wireless link and you can assign an IP address to the LAN port on FreeNAS.

 

[House Of Cards]

Interesting. I'm pretty much half way there for that setup. Thanks.

 

[Jailer]

That's the setup I use for a couple of clients that I can't get wire to.

 

[House Of Cards]

Okay... Here's what I did to break stuff this time around. LOL. Maybe you can help iron this out...?

I added a second NIC to FreeNAS, and connected a cable to an open port on the same access point all my automation stuff is on. The access point is in bridge mode and everything is assigned on that access point by DHCP through PFSense. Obviously, this means that new network card is assigned an IP of it's own. The FreeNAS link (RE0) is at XXX.XXX.1.100 and the second link (EM0) is assigned an address of XXX.XXX.2.100.

FreeNAS sees the NIC fine out of the box, and has created another available interface. But as soon as I connect a cable to the new NIC and it gets an IP, I can't access any jails anymore.

Sooooo, where to start with this $@!&show?

Thanks in advance...
Steven