How can I use my secondary NIC and wire it to vmbr0 to expand my LAN?

everwisher

Member
Jun 23, 2019
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My room has only one RJ45 port in the wall which is taken up by the Proxmox server and I don't intend to add a switch to connect the other device to the LAN through network cable.

The Proxmox server has a 10G NIC which connects to the router and runs behind the default network bridge vmbr0. There is an onboard Intel i211 NIC left unused. I tried to bind the onboard NIC to the bridge by modifying /etc/network/interfaces like this:

Bash:
...
bridge-ports enp4s0 eno1
...

When I reboot the server and connected the device to it, both RJ45 ports light up orange, indicating successful physical connection. However, there is no real network connection between. The server doesn't ping to the connecting device, and the latter doesn't acquire any IP address nor recognizes a correct subnet mask. Also tried to manually set the IP values but ended up in vain.

In the mean time, all the virtual NICs of my virtual machines behind the same vmbr0 can connect to the router and get correct IP configuration.

Please offer help. Thanks in advance.
 
Hi,
what does ip l say when you configure those two ports as a bridge? Can you post your /etc/network/interfaces config?
 
I am trying to do something similar but with more NIC ports and vlans.

Basically I am trying to eliminate the hw switch and transfer those few ports onto proxmox where I have empty ports available.

I have a couple of VLANs in my network and pfsense/opnsense is running on the proxmox host as well. Attaching a screenshot of the intended setup.

I marked "?" for the parts that I don't fully get how to do. Any help is appreciated.
 

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I am trying to do something similar but with more NIC ports and vlans.

Basically I am trying to eliminate the hw switch and transfer those few ports onto proxmox where I have empty ports available.

I have a couple of VLANs in my network and pfsense/opnsense is running on the proxmox host as well. Attaching a screenshot of the intended setup.

I marked "?" for the parts that I don't fully get how to do. Any help is appreciated.
I tried variations of linux bridge, vlan on bride, vlan on interface, combinations of plugging different types of those to each other and didn't work.

I got it working tho with OVS switch and it is quite simple actually.
1. create a OVS bridge with ports/slaves of those interfaces on the proxmox that you will connect your peripherals to such as NAS box, NVR recorder.
Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 5.00.34 PM.png
2. Once the bridge is created, those physical port interfaces you added to the OVS bridge will change type to OVS Port. Now you can configure those ports with vlan_mode=access and vlan tag in the proxmox gui.
Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 5.01.12 PM.pngScreen Shot 2022-07-27 at 5.01.48 PM.png
3. When creating VMs/Containers that need to be in certain vlans, branch off of the OVS Bridge you created in step 1 and give it the appropriate vlan tag
Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 5.04.00 PM.png

Happy to help if you encounter with any issues. I am so happy that I finally got rid of beefy network switches that I didn't really need to.
 

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