PFSense OPT Interfaces ??

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Fritz

Fritz

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2015
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Just added a 6 port NIC to my PFSense box. One port is used for WAN and one for LAN. The others are OPT ports and they're all disabled by default. I thought they would show as more LAN ports just like on a store bought router but it appears not. So what exactly can they be used for in PFSense?

Thanks
 
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BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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Most consumer routers have 2 interfaces, one of which is hooked up to an internal 5 port switch, leaving you with 4 usable ports. As such, they are not individually routable. In pfSense, you can use other interfaces for whatever other networks you'd like (DMZ would be a popular example). It's not really all that different from using VLANs, except in this case you have physical adapters.
 
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sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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they can work like a layer2 switch if you configure them in a bridge configuration but performance will suck compared to hardware switch.
 
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microserf

New Member
May 20, 2019
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sth said:
they can work like a layer2 switch if you configure them in a bridge configuration but performance will suck compared to hardware switch.
Click to expand...
Do you know where in the if_bridge pipeline the bottleneck is? I intend to replace my current setup with 2x10Gb SFP+ and was going to bridge each one with a 1GbE port. I'm not concerned with 10Gb VLAN <-- bridge --> 1GbE performance but am trying to hunt down what effect it will have on 10Gb VLAN <--> switch port.
 
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sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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It’s processed by software rather than by dedicated hardware. This is why you often see people say “routers should route, and switches should switch”. Latency and throughput will be affected by your CPU but even powerful CPUs will compare poorly to a dedicated switch.
Let us know how you get on, data points are always interesting
 
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