Traffic on Red interface is blocked

Getting Started with IPFire
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I have recently installed IPFire update 188 on a LeNovo Thinkstation; the specifications comfortably exceed the minimum required. the Red interface uses the on-board NIC to connect to a Vodafone router with a fibre connection to the outside world; the Green interface uses a StarTech USB to ethernet adapter. The green interface is connected to a 16 port switch, which is also connected to my Linux workstation, my wife’s Windows 10 workstation, two printers and various wireless access points. I am able to access the admin interface of the IPFire box, and it shows a very small amount of traffic over the Red interface, but there is no usable connection to the outside world. Ping to the Vodafone router shows “Not reachable”. Before I installed IPFire I was using Smoothwall Express on an elderly low profile desktop PC and this worked fine. I had also been using a Dell mini PC running IPFire core update 185 with no problem, but when I updated to core update 186 I hit the problem of no internet access. The main motivator for using IPFire is to allow me to allocate fixed IP addresses to all the devices on the home network. Can anyone suggest an path to explore to deal with this frustration, please? Meanwhile I shall switch back to Smoothwall…

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Ian

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Is the Vodaphone also your optical network terminal?

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Yes - that cofiguration has been stable for the past year

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I have occasionally had issues with IPFire seeing my ISP after network outages have been resolved. What seems to work for me in those situations is to turn both the modem and IPFire off. Then I turn the modem on, wait for it to get to a ready state, then turn IPFire on. So maybe try a similar approach? I am guessing your Vodaphone is equivalent to my cable modem.

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Thanks, Tim, I’ll give that approach a trial run and let you know how I get on

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Apologies for the long delay in reviving this topic. Yesterday, I tried the approach described by @bloater99, having installed version Core 194. I watched the messages as IPFire started up; all seemed to go smoothly, though I noticed that dhcpcd seemed to take a very long time to wake up (I timed it - 35 seconds!). However there was a problem resolving 0.ipfire.pool.ntp.org - name or service not known.

I was able to access IPFire on the green interface using Firefox web browser, but nothing else (as in my original post). Can anyone help, please?

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Did you get an IP after the long start time of dhcpcd?
Did you configure DNS and is it in running state?

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Thanks for your reply, @bbitsch. Yes, the router did allocate an IP address for the red interface: 192.168.1.52. The DNS server address and default gateway are both shown as being on 192.168.1.1, the router address. Does “configure DNS” refer to the IPFire box (in which case the answer is “No”) or the router? I’m sorry about the naive questions…

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Yes, I referred to the DNS WebGUI page.
The DNS server in IPFire demands DNSSEC, but this isn’t provided by all DNS servers of ISPs, and probably not by the DNS server in your router.

Try to define the google DNS server, 8.8.8.8, with ‘Use ISP-assigned DNS servers’ disabled. The status should switch to ‘Working’.

See also www.ipfire.org - Domain Name System Overview and www.ipfire.org - List of Public DNS Servers

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Thanks very much, @bbitsch - that’s sort of fixed it. I adjusted the DNS settings on the IPFire box - life gets complicated when I have to keep on disconnecting the Smoothwall from my main PC and reconnecting the IPFire - The issue with the DNS server not working is now OK, but my main Linux box still couldn’t access web sites. However, to avoid this need, I woke up the new Linux box (upgrade planned, but it takes a while…) and connected that to the internet using the IPFire box, while keeping Smoothwall to connect my older Linux box to the internet. I was puzzled to find that the new Linux box was able to connect to web sites via the IPFire box, but somewhat relieved! I’ll heave a sigh of relief, keep my old Linux box talking to the web via Smoothwall and finish migrating to the new Linux box, then pension off the old Linux box and keep the Smoothwall as a reserve “just in case”. Thanks for your help, and best wishes
Ian

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