VLAN Communication via IPFire on OVH CLoud

Getting Started with IPFire In The Cloud
1

Hello everyone ,

Due to certain Italian regulations, I am in the process of migrating my cloud infrastructure to the OVH provider, more specifically to an OVH Public Cloud project ( Public Cloud: Cloud solutions and on-demand resources | OVHcloud Worldwide ).

My goal is to isolate the networks by creating two VLANs (more specifically, orange and green) and to manage security and firewall rules through an IPFire machine.

On OVH, I configured the VLANs using vRack and Private Networks ( Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service | OVHcloud Worldwide ) and assigned the following IP ranges:

VLAN 1: 10.2.0.0/16 (green)

VLAN 2: 10.1.0.0/16 (orange)

IPFire ips are:

VLAN 1: 10.2.0.1 (green)

VLAN 2: 10.1.0.254 (orange)

DHCP is disabled.

This is how machine in green is configured (see attachments: greenMachine.png)

This is how machine in orange is configured (see attachments: orangeMachine.png)

My IPFire setup:

(see attachments: zone.png)

And i have no firewalls rules (except defaults)

(see attachments: firewall.png)

When connecting to the IPFire machine, I am able to ping hosts in both VLANs and vice versa. However, when attempting to ping a host in the orange VLAN from a host in the green VLAN, there is no response (freeze on ping, no message output).

After checking the firewall logs, I noticed that a firewallForward event is triggered, but I am not sure whether this should be considered expected behavior or an issue.

Could someone help me understand how to enable communication between these machines?

Once this is resolved, I plan to add a blue network as well, which should follow the same logic already applied.

At the moment, I have not configured any network interface on the red network in order to avoid excessive log events.

2

Welcome to the IPFire community.

Could you explain that in more detail?

Regards

3

I’m in cloud environment and there is a lot of traffic from WAN (scan, spoofing, ecc). So to a better logs checks i do not assign any NIC to red interface.
This is my configuration:

Schermata_20260120_161058
Schermata_20260120_1610581008×550 35.2 KB

Note: i can’t attach more than 1 file

4

By default, according to the documentation below, connections from the Green network to the Orange network are not blocked.

However, hosts on the Orange network must accept connections from the Green network.

Regards

5

Yes, I already knew of these default rules and in fact, in my other installations, communication works correctly. The issue occurs on the OVH provider, and I wanted to know whether there is any specific configuration to apply, since for other cloud providers there is dedicated documentation (https://www.ipfire.org/downloads/cloud).

6

You can try a simple tests

For ICMP packets outgoing from the orange0 interface
tcpdump -i orange0 -n icmp -Q out

For ICMP packets incoming to the orange0 interface
tcpdump -i orange0 -n icmp -Q in

Both directions are visible
tcpdump -i orange0 -n icmp