Not getting internet, what am I missing?

[hunterjwizzard]

Hey folks - I thought this would be easy. I was wrong.

I am attempting to replace my crappy spectrum router with an OPNsense system. I bought a little fanless industrial PC and it installed just fine. The walkthrough for loading up OPNsense is great.

So far I've managed to set a LAN and WAN ports and the system is handing out DHCP on the LAN. I configured the WAN port to use a static IP based on my current WAN IP(thanks "whatismyip.com") and entered a couple DNS servers in the System --> Settings --> General page. Try though I might, I cannot get internet.

I tried Interfaces --> Diagnostics --> DNS Lookup and am not able to resolve any DNS lookups. This tells me that I am not getting internet access even from the router. This is with the "WAN" port plugged directly into my ISP-supplied modem.

I'm sure I just have a setting wrong or am missing a setting. In general the OPNsense documentation is fantastic, but could benefit from a fairly basic "here's how to replace your ISP's router" guide.

Any help is appreciated.

[bartjsmit]

Your ISP likely needs PPPoE to confirm that you are entitled to an internet connection. This is a remnant from the dial-up days when they weren't able to reliably identify your circuit.

Fish your spectrum out of the bin and have a look for credentials in its web interface. Then in OPNsense go to Interfaces, WAN and change the IPv4 connection type from 'Static IPv4' to PPPoE. This will enable a 'PPPoE Configuration' pane further down the page. Fill in the Username and Password from the old router.

To test that you have internet, ping 8.8.8.8 from the firewall and from a LAN client. It is useful to confirm that before you start worrying about DNS  :)

Bart...

[Stuzoo72]

Is there any reason you are trying to use a static  IP on your WAN side?
Most home ISP should provide the WAN addressing by DHCP. If you set static you will not get all the information that you need from whatismyip.com. You will need the IP assigned to you, the subnet mask, and the gateway. "whatismyip.com" won't give you all those, you could ask your ISP.
Also your ISP may not provide the public IP directly to the device that plugs in to their modem. They may provide the internal devices with private IP addresses and NAT to the outside world on their modem/router.

I suggest you start with automatic/DHCP addressing on the WAN interface, then once that is working look at static if you really have a need.

[hunterjwizzard]

look for credentials in its web interface.

Ah see that would be a bit of a problem: no web interface. The entire reason for binning the stupid thing is my ISP has removed the web interface entirely. I did some research online and apparently if I owned a smart phone there is an "app" I could use to change the wifi password(because OTA management is a fantastic idea, he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm). Other than that I have 0 access to the existing router.

Is there any reason you are trying to use a static  IP on your WAN side?

I did also try DHCP with no luck. Only thing I have not tried yet is enabling both IPv4 & IPv6 an DHCP.

But I guess the core question is should it be that simple? I was worried there were other settings and things I wasn't aware of/able to find thanks to my ***ty none-user-interactable router.

[cookiemonster]

Pretty much yes. Only the session initiation on the line to get the WAN up and running is all you need.
All the other bits are internal so your choices. That is DNS, DHCP, etc. for your LAN.
But hang on. Did you say you are going to have the isp-provided modem in front of OPN?
If you keep it, then OPN with dhcp on wan should work. Putting the public ip from whatsmyip was an error. That is the public ip of the modem, it can't be set on the OPN WAN.
The advice you got to enter the credentials there are if you were to replace both modem and router with only OPN.
So you could be modem + opn as interim until you can get the credentials needed. Check if your isp indeed requires said credentials or not. Some isps do use circuit identifiers aka full network authentication. As mentioned, setting WAN to DHCP should work.

[hunterjwizzard]

Unfortunately I won't be able to try again until Friday evening. I'm going to do another factory reset on the OPNsense and see where we go.

On the off chance this doesn't work, what else can I look into? I'd like to get as many proverbial ducks in a row before I actually try to get this to work again.

[ajm]

What is a 'spectrum router' ?

[cookiemonster]

What is a 'spectrum router' ?

I think refers to the router issued by the spectrum internet service provider.

[hunterjwizzard]

What is a 'spectrum router' ?

I think refers to the router issued by the spectrum internet service provider.

Yes. It even says "Spectrum" on the side. Spectrum is my ISP. I'm sure the the actual OEM is different but they've got the thing so locked down I'll never know.

[hunterjwizzard]

Success, in case anyone cares.

I did observe some very bizarre behavior - upon the second factory reset the OPNsense was able to get online and download updates but still wasn't serving out internet - upon completion of the update it worked perfectly. Took some additional fiddling to actually integrate it but that was all cabling hassles. I am entering this message from my new working firewall!

[Stuzoo72]

Good that you got it going in the end.
What WAN IP settings did you use in the end?

[hunterjwizzard]

DHCP. That was all it really took. Factory default settings, DHCP, and a software update.

Now to figure out how to configure DHCP MAC reservations on the internal LAN, and the long task of configuring my network can begin...