Opnsense and wireless [SOLVED]

[s4rs]

I checked the manual, google and the forum and couldn't find a howto on setting up a opnsense device as a wireless device.

I am running 16.7.9 with BSD 10.3-p11.

My wireless card is picked up fine and I have it defined. I would like it to be just another port on the switch. I am guessing I have to do some routing to join the WAP traffic to the ethernet traffic. Any pointers on how to do this?

[s4rs]

Looks like I need to up the wireless adapter in hostapp mode. Where do you do that? I don't see an option in any of the interface panels.. Thanks for any pointers

[s4rs]

looks like the wireless card I have does not support hostapp mode..

[s4rs]

I had a g USB adapter laying around to test. It supports hostap mode. I was able to get the AP point working.

Rough steps

• define the wireless adapter
• add the wireless adapter
• configure the wireless adapter for access point mode
• set your ssid and security
• save the configuration
• create a bridge connection with the lan adapter
• create a firewall rule allowing traffic to flow from the adapter to all interfaces
• commit the rule

[s4rs]

Well I wrote too soon. I am close but am having an issue with moving traffic from the wireless interface to the lan interface. If I have the lan interface connected to a switch on an established subnet I can connect from the wireless interface. However if I unplug the lan interface I would expect packets to get routed internally. But it doesn't work. I don't get a dhcp address and a static address doesn't work. The current rule is from the wireless interface route packets to all interfaces and all networks. I've tried to go from wireless to lan and all permutations but can't get this to work as I expect. IE a wireless connected device gets a dhcp address from opnsense. The lan side of things works as expected but I am missing something with the wireless interface.

[s4rs]

I am a bit closer to getting things working. I created a transparent bridge per the Wiki https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/transparent_bridge.html?highlight=bridge between the lan and wireless networks. I now get connected and DHCP addresses on the lan and wireless interfaces. I can ping the local Bridge IP and local Wan port. Now I can't get out to Wan's gateway address. From the root console I can ping the Wan's gateway address. I added all pass rules on the Wan, lan, bridge, and Wireless networks but still can't get out. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[s4rs]

Looking at the logs it appears the firewall is allowing outgoing packets but I never see a return. No blocking messages. How do I allow returns from the outgoing request?

[s4rs]

I decided to start from scratch, so I did a factory reset to default then did a pfsense search on bridges. I found this link https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=48947.0 which had a nice write up. Using this and the Opnsense transparent bridge write up I was able to get everything working. I think the key was changing net.link.bridge.pfil_member to 0 ..

after reviewing things I think the first step in the transparent bridge write up was the culprit. Disable Outbound NAT Rule Generation. ..

Any comments are welcome.

[franco]

Did you want to bridge your WLAN on LAN? If so, we should make a dedicated How-To for this in the docs. I can see the problems with the use case similarity though its not similar at all.


Thanks,
Franco

[s4rs]

franco, I did want to bridge my wlan to my lan. Since I am a complete newbe to this I had no idea where to start. The transparent bridge write up got me most of the way. I think I understand what the transparent bridge is trying to do.

A write up on bridging lan and wlan would probably help other newbes like me who want to make a router with a wlan. Since there isn't one I thought I would document what I did in a thread. Bit of rambling but I think someone like me doing a google search would be helped. I know its not the most efficient and probably not what a business would do. It makes sense for some home users like me. In my case the router is in my garage and to have a wlan signal out there is great without having to buy another AP..

I picked up a partaker mini pc 2 ghz celeron proc, 8 gig ram 256g mSata drive wlan and 2 lan ports. My goal with all of this is to eventually setup openvpn. I was using a Microtik router but they don't support openvpn UDP and LZ0 compression. That's why I am going this route. It a fun learning experience so far. Thanks for your continued support.