I am going to build a router with OPNSense (in Proxmox, on an HP thin client). I am stuck with setting up the networking (I have the Inel 4-port card). I don’t really know how to get started. Right now my device has one LAN cable going into it, and my consumer router is doing everything. I can set up a bridge for the other ports, but what IP address will I use for the LAN? I can’t use 192.268.0.1 because that will collide with my consumer router. Do I just take my consumer router offline while I am setting this up?I’d rather not because for sure I will get stuck and will want to look something up online. I guess I could use my phone but not the best when I am trying to see someone setting up something like this.
Silly question, I know, but I just can’t think of a clean way to get this going with minimal disruption. In a nutshell, what’s a good strategy for setting up and testing the OPNSense while it’s not actually doing any routing and then seemlessly drop it in and start working on it?
Your router’s IP can be anything. Choose any internal IP address on your subnet.
You can have 2 routers on the same subnet just make sure you disable DHCP on the new one while you perform the setup of everything else.
Then when you want to switch over, toggle on dhcp on the new router and replace the cables and you should be fine. You’ll know it’s working when you plug into it and get a default route of the new router.
Let’s see if I got this… great idea to disable DHCP on the new OPNSense for now. I forgot about that. Just keep the one LAN cable going in, and I will just keep the IP address as it is right now (.79). Not even worry about the WAN port at all. Set up all of the features, including things like reserved IP addresses and whatnot. Then, when I am ready to drop it in, I will turn the old router off, and on the new router set up a static IP on the LAN port (.0.1) and add the WAN port (DHCP). Drop it in place, turn on DHCP and I’ll be good to go.
Sounds about right, just be aware that your LAN and WAN networks need to be different, so you’ll likely need to change your old router’s dhcp subnet. E.g. 192.168.1.1/24 on the WAN and 192.168.0.1/24 on the LAN.
Yep. Keep the WAN port dhcp Client enabled if you can, just one less thing to worry about.
Also take note that when you change the static IP of the new router it would conflict with the old one (and dhcp might fail). So you might need to set your local clients IP. Take note of the configuration it has and the steps to set it manually.
The rest all sounds right.