Two devices will not stay connected

[Sage_viper]

However, I suppose TrueNAS ends up creating a virtual MAC for this connection internally and no longer uses the physical MAC.

Yes, and this generated MAC will change at every reboot at least for TrueNAS CORE (FreeBSD). Don't know about Linux.

But if it is TrueNAS CORE you can do something to fix it - go to System > Tunables and add a tunable following the screen shot:



The bridge should now have the same MAC address as the physical member interface on every reboot.

This is helpful, thank you! I am on Scale so I'll have to do some digging to make sure this applies, but this may help ultimately.

I'm considering putting this Realtek NIC into my TrueNAS system after I get the Intel NIC set up into my Opnsense box later today. I'm guessing that the ideal setup for this would be to revert my TrueNAS system to the physical NIC, then apply a Bridge interface attached to the secondary NIC for my VMs?

Back on topic, though - after some fiddling and reboots, I haven't seen the same ARP error regarding the TrueNAS system trying to take the gateway IP. I will have to continue to test things to see if my two work laptops are still having issues, however. As of this morning, I still needed to trigger IPv6 off and apply the change to the LAN interface to get it to connect. I'm still waiting on the Intel NIC to arrive later tonight.

[Sage_viper]

To close the loop on this: After switching out the Realtek interface for an Intel interface, all of my problems have dissolved. If anyone comes across this and is pondering trying a Realtek adapter because "it can't be that bad", well, it can :)

Thank you all for your time and attention on this!

[cookiemonster]

I'm glad to hear. Perhaps you would consider for closing the loop, editing the title and ad [Closed] or [Solved]