Hi @mrmarkuz,
I appreciate that you tried to help. Thank you.
I don’t quite follow you on what you mean by to make browsing work … it may be moot at this point.
May I suggest using VirtualBox + OPNsense. That was the quickest way that I found to set up the VLAN output from the Smart Switch In fact, I actually used pfSense but now that I see the power of OPNsense, I would never use pfSense
Sure. I live in a rural part of the world: dirt roads, farms, etc. In the village, there is High Speed Internet.
My neighbor and I are geeks. 
My neighbors are not. We all want High Speed Internet.
The local ISPs focus on high density areas. Not our areas.
We have created a private, wireless last mile to our eight respective homes. In order to remain legal, we cannot share Internet connections. Each home must order their own service.
With the above in mind, logically, we need to implement the following:
[ Cable Modem #1 ] <--> [ Home #1 ]
[ Cable Modem #2 ] <--> [ Home #2 ]
...
[ Cable Modem #8 ] <--> [ Home #3 ]
where the wireless cloud, if you will, connects each home.
Physically, we are using Smart Switches. Each switch has seven usable ports and one additional port to connected to the gateway. The Cable Modems are given a unique VLAN ID.
We have two Smart Switches because at the moment, we have eight Cable Modems.
Our GW has four Ethernet ports allocated as follows:
- Switch 1
- Switch 2
- LAN - to the wireless backhaul antenna
- Free
As we are not forcing people to purchase Static IPs, each Cable Modem is setup in Router mode. Its DHCP addressing is unique across each modem.
Given all the above, we need to map a Home to their corresponding Cable modem. The ISP is very strict about the no-sharing policy. We want to stay within their rules. In other words, no sharing.
With NethServer, I could only get the above to work with two Cable Modems. I had to jury-rig the setup due to the bug:
- Cable Modem #1 - WAN
- Cable Modem #2 - VLAN ID
The VLANs are on the same NIC as the switches. Logically, the switches are internal (green). The VLANs are Internet (red).
I tried many different permutations to make it work. I don’t recall whether I tried with making the Switch NIC red. I thought I did but if you are saying you tested it and got it to work with three or more VLANs, then clearly I did not.
As I mentioned above, I ended up creating a VirtualBox lab to simulate my environment:
- Simulate the output of two smart switches, with eight Cable modems dispensing unique DHCP addressing schemes. Each with their unique VLAN ID.
- The gateway software (e.g. pfSense, NethServer, OPNsense)
- Three homes - I figured that was enough
With my lab set up, I did some Google’ing on different GW solutions. I found OPNsense. I read it was a fork from pfSense.
My experience with pfSense is that it works pretty well. It has some rough edges but not bad.
One of the things about pfSense and OPNsense is the ability to queue up changes, then persist them all at once. NS truly falls short on this front. With NS, on certain changes, you have to persist each one. While it is persisting it, you may or may not lose the Internet and it takes a very long time. The *sense solutions are quick and never lose the Internet.
In fact, I was telling my geeky wife that the in my opinion, NS is more of a hobbyist solution. It’s okay to have some network interruptions while affecting changes. OPNsense is an Enterprise-level solution. You can make many changes without affecting the network.
I also find the dashboard and reports in OPNsense far more modern. NS and Cockpit are a step in the right direction but it’s still way too old.
I would strongly suggest that you spin up a version of OPNsense in a VM. There are a lot of neat features that NS can use.
I’m attaching a couple of images. At the moment, we only have two Cable Modems set up: VLAN ID 103 and 105.
You can see their traffic in these graphs.
I hope this detailed response was helpful. I could go into more detail but in the end, I strongly suggest that you try OPNsense.
Cheers,
-pablo!
Dashboard
Reporting Traffic
Seriously, the Smart Switch is used for tagging/untagging of packets. It is only accessible from within my LAN.
