I have four FTTC (PPPoE/A) WANs and a BT (UK) leased line at work. The FTTCs are 80/20Mbs-1 and the leased line is symmetric 100Mbs-1. I've put all five WANs down a separate 802.1q VLAN. Each of my routers has one physical NIC (Intel 1Gb) dedicated to WANs. The other nine NICs, each, are for internal VLANs.
I use Draytek 120 or 130s modems for single ADSL or FTTC connections but for CARP clusters, I use Billion Bipac 8800NLR2, so I am not doing the PPPoA/E on the pfSense boxes. The Billions are able pass through bits of a /29 and do the PPPoA/E themselves - the only cheap router (~£60) I've found to do this.
I've been running this thing for about four years now. PPPox is a complex beast and there are a few things to look out for such as MTU. PPPoE imposes an eight byte overhead (hence 1492) and back in the day some ill advised auth mechanism required setting a 1458 byte MTU. Apparently, some BT kit supports mini Jumbo frames of 1508 bytes which means that you could set your MTU to 1500 instead of 1492 - good luck with that as a rule of thumb. $DEITY only knows what an ISP in WA has arbitrarily decided to mandate. Here in the UK we have a near monopoly for the infrastructure but lots of providers that use it and so it should be simple. To be fair, I bet you don't get docs like this: https://www.btplc.com/SINet/SINs/index.htm (498 is FTTC)
Anyway, if you are happy maintaining your firewall rule set manually then crack on but nowadays it is hard to do that. pfSense has a lot of quite vociferous users who kick the tyres on a regular basis. It even looks quite pretty these days - all bootstrapped up and stuff, the red thing is long gone.
> The FTTCs are 80/20Mbs-1 and the leased line is symmetric 100Mbs-1.
What's the "-1" in "80/20Mbs-1" and "100Mbs-1" signify? I've never seen this "syntax" or formst used before but maybe it's an EU/UK thing (I'm in .us, FWIW)?
OP has a scientific background. - LOL - I have an HND (technician) in Civil Engineering and I am now the MD of an IT consultancy (obvs). I picked up the habit of using s-1 etc when studying Physics 'A' level (UK) many, many moons ago. Not too sure why I persist with it these days but I dimly remember liking the fact that you can use basic arithmetic on superscripts. To be fair I should put s^-1 but s-1 is reasonably obvious.
I use Draytek 120 or 130s modems for single ADSL or FTTC connections but for CARP clusters, I use Billion Bipac 8800NLR2, so I am not doing the PPPoA/E on the pfSense boxes. The Billions are able pass through bits of a /29 and do the PPPoA/E themselves - the only cheap router (~£60) I've found to do this.
I've been running this thing for about four years now. PPPox is a complex beast and there are a few things to look out for such as MTU. PPPoE imposes an eight byte overhead (hence 1492) and back in the day some ill advised auth mechanism required setting a 1458 byte MTU. Apparently, some BT kit supports mini Jumbo frames of 1508 bytes which means that you could set your MTU to 1500 instead of 1492 - good luck with that as a rule of thumb. $DEITY only knows what an ISP in WA has arbitrarily decided to mandate. Here in the UK we have a near monopoly for the infrastructure but lots of providers that use it and so it should be simple. To be fair, I bet you don't get docs like this: https://www.btplc.com/SINet/SINs/index.htm (498 is FTTC)
Anyway, if you are happy maintaining your firewall rule set manually then crack on but nowadays it is hard to do that. pfSense has a lot of quite vociferous users who kick the tyres on a regular basis. It even looks quite pretty these days - all bootstrapped up and stuff, the red thing is long gone.