Correct. I have received help from that server in the past, and it’s unusable now. Part of what I hope to accomplish is to replace Discord, or at least offer my friends an off-ramp. Getting started with Discord is way easier, and in the year 2026, I wouldn’t know what other client to use to look for a community that gives me quick help via live chat. I no longer know how to use IRC, I’ve found.

Hey, just wanted to chime in and say thank you. I think your guide moves a little fast for someone like me, but through omission, I was able to suss out what was wrong, I think. I don’t know if it was a default setting or if it was something I picked up without understanding it while trying to fill in the gaps of DNSmasque DHCP, but I had two DHCP Options set; one was a Set option for router[3], and the other was a Set option for dns-server[6]. The fact that you didn’t have that in your guide at all led me to try a configuration without them, and now I’ve got full connectivity on my VLAN. I’ll of course now start properly blocking access off rather than leaving everything totally permissive before opening up services to the web.

When I was given a similar suggestion, I asked why I would need proxmox for my project, and I was told something along the lines of, “Don’t discount their usefulness if you’re trying to do this as a career.” I am not trying to do this as a career. I already have one of those. I’m trying to replace subscription services with something more economical and under my control.

I don’t suppose your issue looks anything like my thread from this past weekend in this here community? And as a reminder, tagged ports face networking hardware, while untagged ports face end devices.

Oof, I feel you OP. I started down this road back in February, and I thought I’d be set up by now, but I’m still learning some of the pieces for a project that’s almost exactly the same as yours. If it’s any consolation, I have made a ton of progress. The hardest part can often be when you’ve chosen the pieces you want to use for your project, and then a kind stranger who means well adds extra complexity above and beyond what you want or need on top of their suggestion.

Hey, that’s forward progress! The first I’ve had since this thread! That command did in fact allow me to ping my desktop from my mini PC on the VLAN. It also allowed me to ping 8.8.8.8, which I was unable to do before. On reboot, that default gateway seems to be reset until I run the command again, which makes sense. So I guess my next question is: what does this mean, and how do I fix it? I take it to mean that of those three jobs DHCP is supposed to provide in your list, it’s only done the first one. The DHCP systems in particular are a major change from what OPNsense was just two years ago when the guides I’ve been following were made.

So what do you think might be the problem with it that I might check? As far as I know, if I’ve been assigned an IP address, DHCP is working.

I won’t be able to try this until at least tomorrow after work, more than 24 hours from now, but yes, this was what was in my tutorials as standard. But also agreed in those tutorials was that what I tried doing was even more permissive and ought to “just work”, at the risk of security and with no separation; I always try to do “Hello World” before I try to implement anything of value, and right now I’m barely seeing “Hello”.

They’re on different subnets, so I figured. I believe DHCP is set up properly, because it assigned an IP to that mini PC in my specified range.

Thanks, I’m going to have to go through this with a fine-toothed comb to see where I went wrong. If you read my other comments and have a hunch as to the problem in the meantime, I’m all ears, lol.

The output of that command is:

It was listening when I pinged the gateway from the mini PC.

I might not understand what you mean, but doing the best I can figure out, the output from the endpoint mini PC running ip route is:

192.168.10.0/24 dev enxc84d4422aa48 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.10.157 metric 100

From the OPNsense firewall, the trace route looks like this (I would have expected to see the switches that it hops to in between, but I don’t see them here):

I can’t find any option to print routing tables in my switches, both of them Netgear GS305E switches. I don’t see any mention of it in the manual either. I suspect that what you asked me to do was lost on me.

I watched and rewatched tutorial videos, traced my cables and ports, and configured the port settings until I was able to ping the gateway on this VLAN. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Over the course of today, since posting this thread, I’ve rechecked those settings a handful of times, and they still appear to be correct as far as I know. If I delete the extremely permissive firewall rule that I set up for the VLAN, I lose the ability to ping the gateway, which seemingly validates the rest of my setup and leads me to believe that this is a configuration issue in OPNsense rather than the configuration of my switches…but I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’m still learning this stuff.

I understand that you’re recommending what you think is best based on your experience, but as I’ve been trying to learn self hosting with a semi-simple goal in mind, the extra complexity that folks keep recommending around just about every facet, because their needs or desires are greater than mine once they’re more seasoned than me, does make it all more difficult to take in during the learning process. Maybe I’ll want to go more advanced some day, but for now, the goal is to host fewer than a dozen services off of two different devices that live under my office desk and consume under 100W between them. I want VLANs for this as a means of separation in case the security of my exposed services is compromised, but with this smoke test, I want to prove that I understand the basics of doing so, so it’s currently feeling defeating that I don’t. I don’t want to sound like I’m not appreciative of any help you can offer, but I do still believe that simpler is better for me at this point.

My firewall mini PC has four ports, but only two of them are active; LAN and WAN. I got that much working without much fuss and replaced my ISP’s provided router. There were two dumb switches between the firewall and the office, but once that was working, I replaced them with managed switches; when they’re not yet configured, they’re indistinguishable from dumb switches. I’ve been over my OPNsense configuration a dozen times in this thread by now, but let’s just say this new VLAN is set to be as permissible as I know how to make it, coming very close to my default LAN interface settings as far as rules go. They ought to be identical. The two smart switches are set up such that port 5 is “in” and 1 is “out”. Living room 5 connects to the firewall. Living room 1 connects to the office switch’s port 5. Office switch 1 connects to the end point mini PC. Living room ports 1-5 are untagged for VLAN 1; ports 1 and 5 are tagged for VLAN 10. Office ports 2-5 are untagged for VLAN 1; for VLAN 10, 1 is untagged and 5 is tagged, and port 1 has a PVID of 10.

I spelled all of that out in hopes that I did something stupid that I don’t know how to spot but maybe you do. Every device on VLAN 1 is working as it should with internet access. The one device on VLAN 10 only has access to the gateway and nothing else, despite the most permissive “allow everything” rule I could set up.

That’s what I’m saying though. I believe I tried a few configurations of both 4 and 6 now. At first it was only 4, because a tutorial said I didn’t need to bother. I added one for 6. I tried setting the source to “any” instead of just the VLAN network. I tried a handful of permutations of those things, disconnecting and reconnecting the wired connection to release/renew between each one. It doesn’t seem to have changed.

I think I’ve adjusted it to be as permissible as possible. There are some auto-generated rules that populate above it that, when expanded, look like maybe they would interfere? But I thought the manual rules should override anything in there. I can’t think of anything else.

I don’t see myself needing more advanced functions, and at this point I’d be happy to get the basic ones working, haha.

I understand the concept of a trunk port, but I don’t know how to translate that into some other terminology that my manual uses instead, or if there’s some other paradigm. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the difference between a tagged port and an untagged port, which I think I have configured correctly. I must be at least in the ballpark if I can hit the gateway and nothing else.

The screenshot in the original post is the only firewall rule on 10. This is the equivalent rule on 1 that will look very familiar.

And this is the IPv6 rule on 1. Both of these screenshots were from rules set up by default.

From the mini PC on VLAN 10, the output is:

inet 192.168.10.157/24 brd 192.168.10.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute

Thanks! I appreciate step by step guides with explanations, but as we’ve both covered, the guides I followed have now fallen way out of date. Has OPNsense always moved this fast with ripping out components and paradigms and replacing them with others? Do you have an up to date video guide that you could refer me to so that I get more "how"s and "why"s along with each setting to help understand it better?

Unlike some other settings in OPNsense, there’s nothing like “Legacy” or “Deprecated” to indicate that Dnsmasque is being phased out, and when I see “new Rules”, I suspect that it’s so hot off the presses that it may not be fully working yet. Their replacements are both ready for prime time? Blocking ads by DNS wasn’t a goal I had in mind for this project of mine, but I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to increase scope to cover it.

My switches are both GS305E Netgear switches, and the word “trunk” doesn’t show up anywhere in the manual. What I do have are VLAN 10 ports tagged when they face the firewall or another managed switch; and untagged when they face the end device; as per Home Network Guy. That was what got me far enough along that I was able to ping the gateway. Before that, my pings went completely unanswered.

Unfortunately, most of my networking experiments end up sectioned off to the weekend, because I try to minimize any damage I might do to my home network during the work week (I work from home) and disruption for my wife trying to enjoy the internet herself. All that to say that I might be back here again asking for help, but it will be on a hell of a lag. You definitely gave me some homework to do, too.

A ping against that address works on the VLAN 1 desktop. It returns “Network is unreachable” on VLAN 10. I’m not quite sure what you mean by DNS settings on the host. I’m using DHCP, and DNS appears to be automatic as well. I’m on Debian KDE, for what that’s worth, and historically in my life, I haven’t touched DNS settings basically anywhere; maybe I could count how many times I did on my fingers, but it definitely wasn’t recently for this project. Presumably the problem isn’t only DNS, because these two computers on different VLANs can’t ping each other by IPv4.

Looking at the live view, a ping against Google shows both my and Google’s IPv6 addresses when done from my desktop on VLAN 1, but the logs show nothing of the sort when done from my mini PC on VLAN 10, which isn’t surprising, since the error returned from the terminal is “Temporary failure in name resolution”, meaning the error is before it even knows what Google’s IP address is. I don’t know what step I might have missed for that to be the case.

If you look at my screenshot, those are the settings of my VLAN’s firewall rule, and if there’s a difference between that and the one on the LAN interface, other than the field labeled Interface Name, I don’t know what it is. The LAN interface has a firewall rule for IPv6 as well, but the Home Network Guy tutorial skipped that one, and it still reached the internet. His tutorial was for allowing internet access without reaching the other private networks, but I believe I understand the Invert setting that he checked, and I did the opposite of that specifically for this test.