Struggling with Firewall / Routing & VPN

M_D

New Member
Dec 21, 2025
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It seems I have created myself a puzzle.

I've got PVE 9.1.4 running, using vmbr0 as the main bridge. (Default setup there). There are a few slightly more complex bits I've added, E.G for extra VLAN's, but I don't think this should be affecting anything in this issue, its all just on vmbr0. Config as thus:
1769965020780.png

I am not using SDN features, apart from a couple of VNet definitions. Everything else is pretty much at default under SDN. I've got the PVE firewall enabled at Datacenter, Node, and (on the majority) of VMs / CTs as well. My strategy is to have the firewall default policies Input = DROP, Output = ACCEPT, and then configure explicit rules for incoming traffic to each VM. Works great.

I previously had a WireGuard VPN server on a machine on my LAN, in fact it still exists, but it was running on Windows along with a bunch of other services, so I decided to decommission it. I created a new VM in PVE running Ubuntu Server, and configured this as my WireGuard server. It uses "routing" mode, E.G WG clients get assigned IP's in a pool dedicated to WireGuard. Then, I have a static route on my physical network gateway, pointing the WG subnet to the WG server. This has worked great in the past before PVE was involved.

I've got to a point where I can connect to the WG server from another WAN connection (testing), and my PC receives an IP in the WG subnet, and I can successfully route to (ping) Internet Hosts, as well as the physical gateway, the WG server (VM) LAN IP, and the WG server WG interface IP. I can also access the web interface of PVE from the WG client.

However, I cannot access any VMs running on Proxmox, and it seems I cannot access (ping) various generic hosts on the remote LAN which the WireGuard subnet should be able to route to.

I am currently very stuck, so would appreciate some help. GPT is useless here, it just gets confused with this one!

I hope that makes sense, I can certainly provide more detail as needed. I am not 100% sure if this is a Proxmox issue, or a general issue with my WireGuard, but I am pretty sure I had my WG setup working similarly before (before PVE involved), without any issues.

Thanks.
 
Do you see where the traffic gets stuck? (e.g. via tcpdump). If it works for everything but the VMs it sounds like potentially the return path doesn't work - but imo the best way is to first check where the traffic to the VMs get stuck and then take it from there.
 
No - I have done a lot of testing with ping, but haven't tried tcpdump yet.

I will do some further experiments whilst capturing some packets.