New at this and Struggling with PPPoE routing

[tre4bax]

Hi All,

Numpty, newbie question necessitated as this is driving me made.  I'm trying to get my broadband working using a Opnsense firewall.  I am an IT professional and I have done a fair bit with networks before, just not with OpnSense and not with PPPoE and not for quite some time ;-)

Initially I connected it on a Networking level to my vodafone router.  This works fine, although the latency is noticable and there is the underlying double nating going on.  My vodafone router cannot be put in bridge mode, however in my loft I had a huawei HG612.

I configured a Vlan of 101 setup the Wan to use that and set up PPPoE with the passwords etc.  If I look in overview this link is up and working fine.  If I try to send packets from the Lan nothing happens.  Same happens if I try and use the ping tool on OpnSense to contact an external service. 

I appear to have connected to the vodafone broadband and yet I cannot pass packets so I am doing something wrong.  I've checked for a gateway etc.  I cannot find the IP address assigned to my broadband anywhere in OpnSense though so I think I may need to set something up here.

Anyone got time to give me some pointers on what I should be looking for? 

[eck]

you have to create a bridge -> interfaces -> other type -> bridge

[tre4bax]

Ah, thank you.  That makes sense.  I will give it a try tonight.

[tre4bax]

I have tried this, no joy though.  I created a bridge between the PPOE connection and the local Wan port though so not sure if this was right.  Creating a bridge between the PPOE and the LAN seemed like a really bad idea.

Feels like something is just not configured correctly and I'm not getting it.  I note that the PPPoE connection itself does have an IPV6 address (although I wanted to turn off all IPV6 at this stage) however it has no IPv4, suggesting the connection is not getting DHCP.  I might try statically assigning an IPv4 address.

Challenge is I have to disconnect it all to look up solutions on the internet!

[marjohn56]

Who's your ISP? If you have an HG612 and you are using VLAN 101 on that it sounds like a UK system, is it?


If so, you  do not set up PPPoE on the HG612, It gets setup on OPNsense.

[tre4bax]

Yep I am in the UK, using Vodafone broad band.

I have done exactly that on OpnSense.  I setup a VLAN interface on 101.  I plugged that into the WAN configured as PPPoE with the password etc for my link.  All of that works.  I get an "Up" status in the overview. All seems to be fine with this side of the link.  I just cannot get packets to travel over it.  Nothing happens.

If I look in the routes I can see IPV6 stuff (despite having put all IPV6 to none to try to reduce complications).  And I see an IPv4 address for the Lan.  I happily access my OpnSense box from here.  Nothing goes through it to the internet though.  I've tried bridges etc.   I just cannot figure out where the PPPoE connection actually is to setup a route to.  Not only that nobody else on the internet ever seems to have had that problem!

Today I have unlocked the DG612 so I can get on it and look at what it is doing.  It says it is connected.  It says it is using a PPPoE bridge.  So I have the same mystery there as on the OpnSense router.

Just stumped now.

[marjohn56]

You don't need a VLAN on OPNSense for that, that's all handled by the 612. Just set OPNsense as a simple WAN interface, PPPoE on IPv4, enter your credentials in the PPPoE boxes and that's it. IPv6 should be set to dhcp6, use IPv4 connectivity. Like the images shown here.

[tre4bax]

Thanks Marjohn56. 

I had trouble getting the PPPoE to connect and the advice I found was that I had to do this.

I decided to go with a full factory reset on both this morning and setup from scratch and see if that helps.  At least it will be cleaner in the long run.  If I can get it going.

Really want to get some OpnSense goodness into my network...

[tre4bax]

Well doing a factory reset on both helped.

I now have a route out and I can manage to send stuff from one network to another.  What I need to understand now is why I cannot do that on a network level.  I can do an NSlookup and get back the ip address of the web site.  I cannot access the website though.

I have a LAN any rule in place at the moment so I thought anything on my LAN should be able to go in and out.  Doesn't seem to though and even though I can NSlookup from the OpnSense tools and Ping some addresses from there, I cannot run a tracert from there.

I guess I have loads more reading to do before I can make this work :-(   I naievly assumed that a basic setup would be easy and I could work it to be more complex from there.

[marjohn56]

Sorry I haven't been able to reply earlier. Had to do some real work today.


OK, by default OPNsense works out of the box with very little required to get your LAN up and running and talking to the Internet.


Can you ping 8.8.8.8 from the diagnostics?

[tre4bax]

No problem, certainly no reason to apologise.  Your help is gratefully received.

I went into diagnostics and tried to ping 8.8.8.8 and it failed.  I then pinged 1.0.0.1 and it worked.

Went into settings general and added 8.8.8.8 as a DNS server with the gateway set to the wan.

Back in diagnostics tried to ping 8.8.8.8 and it worked perfectly.

It would seem to be something going on within OpnSense to do with routing or firewalling that is stopping stuff not specifically configured from travelling. 

[marjohn56]

One of the TR members runs a BT connection, I'll ask him to send a config over.

[tre4bax]

Thanks for that.  I am using an old 612 against a Vodafone broadband.  I am pretty sure though that Vodafone actually piggy back on BT anyway as they use the same VLan as BT hence why the whole shebang does seem to connect.

I did read a post somewhere that said something about the auto NAT rules not working and you needed to create a NAT rule.  This seemed weird and at this stage I wanted my config as default as possible.  Once I have something working, then I can save the config and look to start to implement some of the stuff that I wanted this to do in the first place ;-)

[marjohn56]

There is no funky stuff, it should just work. 

[tre4bax]

Mine is identical to that and doesn't work :-( 

Could you show me what your System->Routes->status looks like?  Maybe there is something in there that will solve the issue for me.