Hotspot - RelayD - Gateway

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I'm in over my head and pleading for help.
History: I have a pfSense failover/firewall router serving my home network connected to Cable WAN. I added a Netgear LB1120/Cellular modem in bridged mode as failover. It worked great in that I ended up with a $184 bill one month because it switched over in the middle of a Netflix movie.

I cancelled my cell account and now have a WiFi Hotspot account which I'd like to use for failover as in the following diagram.
Diagram

I bought a $20 TP-Link WR841N (v13) and installed snapshot, luci and relayd. It works fine with my laptop in that I can connect the laptop on ethernet and get internet through relayd. laptop=192.168.208, gateway=192.168.1.1 and wlan0=10.232.192.32

But something changes when I plug this into pfSense. It doesn't quite act like a gateway or like the cell modem. The cell modem was 192.168.1.5 and provided pfSense with the WAN inet addr but this provides pfSense with DHCP of 192.168.1.224.

pfSense ifconfig:

Summary 
em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=4209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO>
	ether 00:eb:cb:40:01:91
	hwaddr 00:eb:cb:40:01:91
	inet6 fe80::2eb:cbff:fe40:191%em0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
	inet6 2001:558:6030:35:48a9:444e:225c:ee04 prefixlen 128 
	inet 71.196.69.195 netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 255.255.255.255 
	nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
	status: active
em1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=4209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO>
	ether 00:eb:cb:40:01:92
	hwaddr 00:eb:cb:40:01:92
	inet 10.0.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255 
	inet6 2601:582:8601:2b7e:2eb:cbff:fe40:192 prefixlen 64 
	inet6 fe80::1:1%em1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 
	nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
	status: active
em2: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=4209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO>
	ether 00:eb:cb:40:01:93
	hwaddr 00:eb:cb:40:01:93
	inet6 fe80::2eb:cbff:fe40:193%em2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3 
	inet 192.168.1.224 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 
	nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
	media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
	status: active

OpenWRT ifconfig

Summary

br-lan Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 7C:8B:CA:CB:BE:6E
inet addr:192.168.1.1 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fdc8:c2b6:36be::1/60 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: fe80::7e8b:caff:fecb:be6e/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:157 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:153 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:14435 (14.0 KiB) TX bytes:21770 (21.2 KiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 7C:8B:CA:CB:BE:6E  
          inet6 addr: fe80::7e8b:caff:fecb:be6e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:159 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:167 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:17953 (17.5 KiB)  TX bytes:24751 (24.1 KiB)
          Interrupt:5 

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 7C:8B:CA:CB:BE:6E  
          inet addr:10.232.192.32  Bcast:10.255.255.255  Mask:255.224.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::7e8b:caff:fecb:be6e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:46 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:95 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:4798 (4.6 KiB)  TX bytes:8954 (8.7 KiB)

Looking for a smart network person to point me in the direction to make the OpenWRT look like the Netgear cellular modem to pfSense. It seems doable but I can't seem to get there. Thanks for reading.

2

It seems like you want to bridge the wifi to Ethernet and let pfsense do the routing and firewall. In other words the tplink should be layer 2 only, like a modem in bridge mode. It doesn't need to do DHCP on wifi, or provide DHCP on Ethernet.

Can't provide any specific config help right now, but maybe this above suggestion can help you do the config.

I'd recommend adding a vlan for management. So you can plug in an Ethernet cable and get DHCP on the Vlan and change configs.

3

Yes. Thanks for the tip. I followed the relayd document and it worked on my laptop but I can kind of see what you're saying. I'll work on that.

4

I would set up a routed client. It doesn't really matter to double-NAT all the stuff to the hotspot, since you're only using it for outgoing Internet.

You can't simply bridge a regular STA to AP connection. STA to AP assumes that only one user MAC address exists on the STA side.

5

Thanks. Found this recipe to study.
https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/recipes/routedclient

6

In this case there's just the pfsense router, the tplink is a fancy way to turn Ethernet into radio waves... Or am I missing something?

7

tplink is a fancy way to turn Ethernet into radio waves

Or the other way around. I'm trying to essentially make one of the pfsense appliance ethernet ports into another WAN port which happens to be a wifi access point but I'm not there yet. (The wifi is provided by community and on generator backup. Slow, but reliable.)

8

@mk24 pointing out that your radio will be in STA mode not AP and this may be problematic for a bridge solution. I don't know for sure what would happen. It's possible an ebtables layer 2 NAT might help.

With the routed solution you get double or triple NAT maybe but whatever works... It's fallback anyway.

9

Looks like relayd is intended to overcome the issue with bridging. What was wrong with the relayd set up again?