[SOLVED] Networking Troubleshooting help

[papantou]

Hello all,

first of all I want to say what a great product Proxmox is. I'm new to the homelab scene and it really is a big help!

So, I have bought a small server just to setup different VMs and play around a bit and I want the VM network and my home network to be separate and the former only accessible from the latter through a vpn configuration (I know its more complicated than it needs to be but I see this as a learning experience cause I hate networking and I want to face my fears). My server only has one physical NIC. I have installed pfsense on my machine and created 2 linux bridges on proxmox (vmbr0 that has bridged ports with the physical nic in order to function as a wan interface for pfsense and vmbr1 in which I left all the options blank during creation). All of the VMs in the lan side of pfsense have access to the internet and work seemingly correctly network-wise. I also set up the openvpn server in pfsense (with a tunnel network and everything) but my computer (which is in the home network) cannot establish a connection though the OpenVpn Connect application.
One other thing I should mention is that when I created an inbound firewall rule on my personal computer (windows 11) to allow everything, I could ping my computer from a linux VM in proxmox but not the opposite. I am positive that I'm doing something wrong but I can't pinpoint the problem (wrong proxmox, pfsense or pc firewall configuration).

Some relevant information:

Home PC IP: (dhcp)192.168.2.2
Proxmox IP: (static)192.168.2.10
Pfsense WAN: (dhcp) 192.168.2.11
Pfsense LAN: (static) 10.0.33.1
OpenVPN tunne network: (configured in pfsense) 10.0.34.0

Proxmox Network Interfaces

Name	Type	Active	Autostart	VLAN aware	Ports/Slaves	CIDR	Gateway
enp6s0	Network Device	Yes	No	No
vmbr0	Linux Bridge	Yes	Yes	No	enp6s0	192.168.2.10/24	192.168.2.1
vmbr1	Linux Bridge	Yes	Yes	No

I'd really appreciate any help or nudge in the right direction.
Thank you!

 

[Undergrid]

This looks ok so far (except I'd give your pfsense WAN a static IP address). If you can go from pfsense to devices on the 192.168.2.0/24 but not from the network to pfsense, it's probably a firewall rule issue.

Check both the firewall for the VM on proxmox and the rules within pfsense itself. I'd try turning the proxmox one off and adding a universal accept rule for the WAN on pfsense just to see if the ping works then. If so, you can then secure the firewall appropriatly. If not, you've at least ruled out the firewall.

 

[papantou]

I found the solution to the problem today. As with most errors in computer science, it was a user error... The problem was that I had ticked the "Block private networks and loopback addresses" box when configuring the WAN interface in pfsense. I unselected it and the networking works as intended! Thanks so much @Undergrid for urging me to look on the firewall configuration because my attention had shifted to hardware problems!