pfsense problems

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Patriot

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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Took me awhile to decide which forum to drop this in...

I am trying to run a pfsense box to replace my dead router and gimpy dir615 temp place holder.

I am running it in ESXi 5.5

Here is what I have...
Internet IP
DNS servers listed...
DNS lookup for lan machines from pfsense vm
I can ping everything on the local network.

Here is what I don't have.
The ability to ping outside the network (internet)
or browse there from any Lan machine.
the pfsense box also cannot get to pfsense.org to look at packages.

So I have an internet IP but I can't use it...


I thought at first Charter was being a douche about my mac address being a touch nutty having vswitch and pfsense box having diff mac addy. cloned vswitch to test... nope.

(vswitch was 00:10:18:00:00:00) wondered if that screwy of mac was annoying charter... tried nic passthrough and that really didntwork.


Remade the wan vswitch on a new port and cloned the Dlink's as well as vswitch... neither worked.

I have gone through various setup guides and followed them to the T... everything looks right but no internet.

Help?
 
MiniKnight

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Did you try putting another VM through the same WAN vswitch with the same settings?

Had a similar issue with a different hypervisor. Spent a week trying to fix with the team. In the end the vswitch was the issue. It was not properly passing traffic to the switch and external network we needed it to due to some vlan config we had setup.

Might help b/c that sounds like the same prblem.
 
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dswartz

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Jul 14, 2011
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Might need to enable forged address transmits, mac address changes and promiscuous mode on vswitch?
 
Patriot

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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promiscuous mode is enabled on both wan and lan Vswitches.

I do not know if pfsense can ping the ISP gateway, I did not try.

from coworker... esxi may not be configured to point at modems internal IP as it would need to be.

I have not tried a second vm with identical settings but it will happen tonight if the ESXi settings are as they should be. pfsense takes little enough time to install it sounds well worth the try.

Thanks for the suggestions, @work will try when I get home...
 
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MiniKnight

MiniKnight

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Other than the identical VM I generally keep a CentOS liveCD ready. If the LiveCD VM can reach yahoo then I know the switch is passing some traffic externally.
 
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dswartz

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Jul 14, 2011
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This *should* work, FWIW. I am running pfsense 2.1 on esxi 5.1 and it works fine. That doesn't directly help you, I know, but it does prove that it isn't the case that pfsens and esxi are incompatible.
 
Patriot

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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MiniKnight said:
Other than the identical VM I generally keep a CentOS liveCD ready. If the LiveCD VM can reach yahoo then I know the switch is passing some traffic externally.
Click to expand...
I have a debian VM up on the lan, but I have not tossed it on the wan vswitch... that would be easy to do as well...I have all sorts of live CDs crawling around :)

dswartz said:
This *should* work, FWIW. I am running pfsense 2.1 on esxi 5.1 and it works fine. That doesn't directly help you, I know, but it does prove that it isn't the case that pfsens and esxi are incompatible.
Click to expand...
Yeah... pfsense even has an install guide for doing it. The only possible incompatability I am seeing is my ISP and creativity.
 
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dswartz

Active Member
Jul 14, 2011
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Are you actually getting an IP - e.g. you can sniff the WAN and see the DHCP request/reply? Remember that pfsense is freebsd based, and I have seen ISPs before which don't seem to play nice with pfsense (I use verizon FIOS - I sympathize that you have charter...)
 
M

mixer

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Nov 26, 2011
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Did you set up the Gateway correctly in pfSense (look at the WAN config page). That has gotten me before.
 
Patriot

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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Will double check... I pulled a long day yesterday and just crashed when I got home... but as I worked 9-8 ... I figure I can cut out early today. yay for flex schedules. PG still empty, -.- not sure if still on vaca or laid off...
 
Patriot

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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Well, thank you all for your help. I decided that the ESXI licensing uncertainty was something I didn't want to deal with for my router and am going to use that box as just a fileserver and picked up an Ubiquiti EdgeMax Lite router to fill that role, and it is doing a marvelous job. PFsense also was way more than I bargained for tbh and I never would use it to its full capabilities.

I hope to play with ESXI at home more once they figure out thier licensing stuff... and I may play with it anyways... I just dont want it to be part of the house infrastructure.
 
Patrick

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Patriot said:
...and am going to use that box as just a fileserver and picked up an Ubiquiti EdgeMax Lite router to fill that role, and it is doing a marvelous job. PFsense also was way more than I bargained for tbh and I never would use it to its full capabilities.
Click to expand...
Ha! I have one of those sitting right next to me now. I am somewhat excited. I am actually thinking of/ strongly considering swapping the colo out to use two of these since apparently they can do BGP.
 
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