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So I installed a new switch last night and deleted the bridge and... everything started working again.

I'm not 100% ready to trust again, but this does feel different than the other intermediate moments of functionality I've had previously; I'll update this post if it goes wonky again.

- DCHP max lease time is 4 hours.
- This is happening to all devices connected via the AP.

My current plan is to grab a switch tonight and eliminate the bridge, and see if that helps, and if it doesn't I'll try out a different AP.

The max lease time is set to four hours, default is two hours.

I do see the ARP requests on the bridge, and they are being replied to... is it suspicious that the replies are addressed to the mac address and not the IP? They look like,

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2.205907 fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 Broadcast ARP 64 Who has 192.168.1.1? Tell 192.168.1.115
2.205912 FreeBSDFound_10:ad:0b fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 ARP 46 192.168.1.1 is at 58:9c:fc:10:ad:0b
2.487226 192.168.1.2 255.255.255.255 UDP 843 41450 → 29810 Len=801
2.650812 Apple_31:ed:b2 Broadcast ARP 64 Who has 192.168.1.1? Tell 192.168.1.9
2.650818 FreeBSDFound_10:ad:0b Apple_31:ed:b2 ARP 46 192.168.1.1 is at 58:9c:fc:10:ad:0b

Also to make this additionally fun, my laptop is now connecting fine via the AP, although other devices are not. This happened without me making any changes to firewall settings (the only thing I can think of that i did was establish a VNC connection to another machine on the LAN).

@dseven I followed that guide for setting up the bridge, and it was working until I started to fiddle with DHCP.

I _did_ have an extra interface assignment for the interface that is being used for WAN, but it was disabled. Removing it and rebooting has changed nothing.

@pfry the ARP table also looks fine, it follows what I see in the leases.

Something else I just noticed: in my DCHP logs I'm seeing a lot of redundant requests from the devices that I'm having trouble with, like:

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2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPACK on 192.168.1.115 to fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.115 from fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Debug dhcpd reuse_lease: lease age 299 (secs) under 25% threshold, reply with unaltered, existing lease for 192.168.1.115
2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPACK on 192.168.1.115 to fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.115 from fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:27:19-04:00 Debug dhcpd reuse_lease: lease age 299 (secs) under 25% threshold, reply with unaltered, existing lease for 192.168.1.115
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPACK on 192.168.1.115 to fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.115 from fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Debug dhcpd reuse_lease: lease age 265 (secs) under 25% threshold, reply with unaltered, existing lease for 192.168.1.115
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPACK on 192.168.1.115 to fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Informational dhcpd DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.115 from fa:4c:d1:56:48:d3 (iPhone) via bridge0
2025-03-16T16:26:45-04:00 Debug dhcpd reuse_lease: lease age 265 (secs) under 25% threshold, reply with unaltered, existing lease for 192.168.1.115

and that seems weird? 

Apologies if this isn't the best venue for this sort of newb question; if there is a better one please let me know.

I've recently installed opnsense (25.1.2, on a qotom box) because I wanted to "learn a bit more networking", and, well... careful what you wish for?

My installation is very vanilla. The only maybe-slightly-funny thing right now is that I have four of the ethernet interfaces on the router box bridged; this is temporary while I wait to get a switch.

I have two machines connected directly via ethernet, and this is working fine.
I also have an EAP610 connected via ethernet, and this has... been funny.

Basically I'm intermittently running into an issue where devices connected to the AP are receiving IP addresses via DHCP (from opnsense) and are showing up in the DCHP leases list, but they can't access the router or the WAN.

- pinging the router fails (no route to host; wireshark shows a bunch of unanswered ARP broadcasts looking for 192.168.1.1, the router ip)
- pings from the router reach the client, but it doesn't reply

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2368 2966.036740 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.102 ICMP 98 Echo (ping) request  id=0x91cc, seq=6/1536, ttl=64 (no response found!)- but pinging other things on the network is fine (clients can ping the AP and other clients)
- this AP was working fine with the previous router, and was working for a while with this one
- I haven't added any firewall rules

The other bit of relevant information is that this was working fine until I started messing about with static DHCP reservations. Since then the error has recurred a few times, and has also resolved itself a few times, often on a timescale that coincides with the max DCHP lease length (as in, last time I was putzing around in the morning before work, this problem occurred, and then wireless wasn't working for about 24h).


So: how should I be thinking about this problem? What are useful debugging steps? I know how computers work and I'm comfortable in the command line, but I don't know much about networking.