So I come from OPNSense, which was overkill for me, just the static IP addressing in DHCP using ARP was way complex. Never put it live. But I did have it running for a few weeks experimenting and setting some things up. It was connected to the Internet, but not acting as FW and accessible via a dedicated LAN IP that was not ..1.1 . Before OPNSense I used Zyxel USG.
It is on a SOHO LAN with maybe 70 devices, one router, one switch and a few servers. The network equipment is EdgeMax.
In my setting up IPFire I am struggling getting past the setup requirements for RED. Do I need to connect the RED port to my internet connected switch for the setup to go through, or is there another way?
GREEN is connected to switch. I see no point having both RED and GREEN connected to the same switch while accessing IPFire and setting up some parameters like static addresses and some other things, prepping for the go-live.
My network topology is as simple as you can get considering I have one device of each.
ISP-Modem Fiber
Router (to be replaced with IPFire)
Switch
LAN + AP-WIFI
Router is on 192.168.1.1, Lan is 192.168.1.1/24
I have maybe a dozen fixed IP’s to setup before disconnecting the Router and putting the IPFire in its place with DHCP.
Reading between the lines I believe that what you are looking to do is to have your existing router in place while you have IFFire’s green interface connected to the existing lan and with the red interface not connected to anything so that you can configure IPFire with all the IP’s for your lan etc and when completed to remove the existing router and replace with IPFire.
Please confirm if my interpretation is correct or not.
If yes, then you will need to define the red interface when doing the setup, with static or dhcp connection depending on what your ISP provides you with but just leave it unconnected so it will have a disconnected status. You can still configure it in that mode by accessing the wui from another machine on your lan network.
The challenge would be that your existing router would likely have a dhcp server for your network and to setup the dhcp server it needs to be enabled so you would have two dhcp servers on your network which can cause problems. Your best bet might be to just try it and see if it works okay enough to set up your IPFire.
I could perhaps define another ip range for the GREEN dhcp, if that has to be enabled. My original thought on this was to just throw it a static address and no dhcp…
Not forgotten, but won’t be able to check until next weekend. Can’t have anyone home for that due to nagging about “me messing with network again” from obnoxious cohabitants…
ok, up an running default setup… I skipped the original plan, keeping my former router untouched as backupp while i mess with this… soo many questions… down boy… rtfm…