Tag Archives: pfSense

VLANs with pfSense, Unifi, and VMware ESXi

Technical Stuff, Video, , ,

For setting up VLANs in my home network I basically followed the tutorial from Crosstalk Solution on YouTube:

The result, however, was not working as expected. As it turned out the critical difference was that I have my pfSense firewall running virtualized on VMware ESXi 6.5. By default the latter “removes” VLAN tags.

But it is very easy to change this and not even a reboot is required. So here are the steps you need to perform:

  • Log in to the admin web UI of ESXi
  • Go to the network port groups and open your internal network
  • Open settings for internal network
  • Change VLAN to 4095
  • Save change

That’s all 🙂

pfSense Upgrade to 2.4.4 p1

Technical Stuff, ,

Just a few short lines to let you know that for me the upgrade from plain 2.4.4 to p1 went really smooth.

I have the following plugins installed:

  • bandwidthd (0.7.4_1)
  • iftop (0.17_2)
  • net-snmp (0.1.5_2)
  • ntopng (0.8.13_3)
  • Open-VM-Tools (10.1.0,1)
  • suricata (4.0.13_11)

All plugins had been updated some time ago and thus prior to the pfSense core, which is not recommended. In my case, though, it did not cause any issues. This was a pleasant difference to the upgrade from 2.4.3 to 2.4.4 (also see this video on YouTube), where the fact that plugins had been installed was cause for a completely broken system after the upgrade.