Connect to DSL modem over two switches

[chbaer]

At the moment I've got a DrayTek Vigor167 directly connected to igc0 on my pfsense box. igc1 is connected to a switch and evrything works as expected.

I'll move to a new house and the modem has to be in another room than my network rack. I would like to connect igc0 on the pfsense box to my switch too and connect the modem to another switch in the other room. Both switches will be directly connected.

I created a new VLAN 10 and defined the ports on the switches as untagged VLAN 10.

Now OPNsense can't establish a pppoe connection.

Is there a way to make things work like this? What am I doing wrong or where should I start debugging?

Best regards

[Maurice]

The ports interconnecting the two switches need to be configured as trunk ports. Add VLAN 10 as a tagged VLAN there. Configuration details depend on your switches.

Cheers
Maurice

[chbaer]

Thanks for your reply. To be clear: I don't want to set a VLAN tag on the PPPoE connection. This is handled by the modem. I just want to replace the straight cable from the modem to the router.

The switch connection is trunked. It doesn't even work when I use two ports on the same switch.

If i set the ports to trunk, how does OPNsense and the modem know that they should communicate over VLAN 10?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

In theory PPPoE can work just fine across a switch. It's just Ethernet frames, MTU 1500, even. So try with one switch and of course untagged ports, first.

If it works in practice depends very much on the particular switch model, I guess.

[Maurice]

The switch ports connected to the modem and to the OPNsense WAN need to be configured as untagged access ports for VLAN 10. The ports connecting the two switches need to be trunk ports which allow VLAN 10 (tagged).

If it doesn't even work with the modem and OPNsense connected to the same switch, I'd suspect the switch to block the Ethertypes used by PPPoE. Check its settings for allowing / filtering specific Ethertypes.