Is it possible to use a router to connect to blue?

I have a Netgear wifi router. The “ISP Port” is a bit different in that you can use it to connect to other routers. Not just the ISP. My question is whether it is possible to connect that router to a IPFire Blue assigned ethernet card? If so, that would solve a lot of issues for me as long as I didn’t have to put the router in bridged mode for it to work.

I believe in your scenario, IPFire DHCP server will assign an IP address in your Blue network space to the Netgear wireless router, populating its NAT table. In turn, any machine connecting to the Netgear using WiFi will get another IP from it, with its own internal NAT. Therefore any traffic from the wireless-connected machines to Internet and vice-versa will have to go through two rounds of NAT. You will have then a double NAT. Not ideal as things can go wrong (as described in the link).

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Regardless of being a double nat, is it possible? Bridged mode is not good either. Also, I can set the router to have a static address so it is not using a dhcp assigned address. And even in bridged mode the wireless uses a completely different ip range. My biggest question here is what else do I need to configure in order to use blue to connect to my router? I need to set this up this way to get the security needed on the wifi. Bridged has practically none and it feeds directly into green. The wireless card concept is nice but the majority of home owners will have routers. Like mine. I understand that connecting a wifi/router to blue is not ideal but there MUST be security on the wifi. I know there are no instructions available to guide someone through the process of doing what I am suggesting but if someone could give a brief list of the settings in IPFire that would need to be adjusted that would be a nice start.

Many home users have wireless routers for internet access, that’s right.
But IPFire can replace these, and IPFire has security for the WLAN also ( in a more controllable way, IMO ).
Bridged mode doesn’t mean to bridge LAN and WLAN, but to bridge the traffic coming from the IPFire blue NIC to the WLAN traffic of the routers AP ( the router device acts as AP only, routing and firewalling is done in IPFire ).
This standard config can be described as follows:

  • WAN is provided by your ISP, carrier is chosen by ISP ( DSL, Fiber, Cable, … )

  • some kind of modem to convert ISP carrier to Ethernet ( often this device contains a router for LAN and WLAN also, doing NAT )

  • IPFire:
    red0 NIC is connected to the ethernet port of the router/modem
    green0 NIC is connected to your LAN
    blue0 NIC is connected to some sort of WLAN AP

The blue0 NIC can be implemented by an internal wireless card ( hostapd addon ) or just an ethernet NIC.

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Thank you for the quick reply and thank you for the information. Now I am aware that I can indeed attach my wifi/router to the Blue nic and use bridged mode and get the firewall protection I wanted. These were the specific answers I needed and came from one of the primary architects of IPFire. I can now proceed with confidence. Since there is no specific info related to what I am going to do it may be necessary to ask more questions. I hope not.
Thank you again.

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