my Router having problems with all my smart switches (tasmota) dropping not playing nice
doing dum things
so I Built a pfsense box turn the router into a access point
have pfsense doing the DHCP (36 items) happy camper well …
but I think pfsense is doing something to MQTT
ie my HA SwitchPlate shows the ipaddress and mqtt broker ip address screen
after some time it connects then back to the above screen
some of my lights dont turn on/off ie the long presses send a MQTT command
if I take out the pfsense box everything works like before
If everything is on the same subnet, there is no reason for any traffic to go through pfsense (unless something is broken, it will never see pfsense). It should only go through the switch, so the question is, What does your network diagram look like?
Are you using an external address to access MQTT? Like your public DNS name? Or are your devices trying to talk to it by hostname and PFSense doesn’t have it in its database?
Here are a few thoughts from the network perspective…
First pfSense is a pretty deep system and setting it up correctly can really depend on a lot of things. It’s out of the scope of this problem. @flamingm0e is right, a diagram of your network would help. Having said that, here’s a couple of thoughts:
When you replace your existing router with pfSense and turn on DHCP on pfSense, all your devices can potentially get different IP addresses than they had with the previous router. They just get handed out willy-nilly. Unless you are using DHCP reserved addresses, and have also configured them in pfSense the same as your previous router. Devices are pretty good at holding on to the same address once they’re connected, and that would explain why they go back to working fine after you swithc back to your old router. Again, this may or may not be the problem, but it’s a good candidate.
It’s also possible that your old router (as an access point) is still performing NAT instead of operating in “bridge mode.” If that were the case, then assuming your pfSense box is the “head-end” router, then your wireless devices would be able to “see” the wired ones, but the wired ones would not be able to “see” the wireless ones. But it sounds like you have determined that all the devices are on the same subnet, so if you’re right about that, this would not be an issue.
If the above doesn’t make much sense, then I hate to say it, but you should probably head over to the pfSense documentation and forum to do some research there.