great video, clear and amazingly helpful. in openwrt 22.03.5, the "bridge interfaces" checkbox in the "add new interface" menu is no longer there, is there something i need to do in this version to acheive the same thing?
They moved the functionality to the "devices" tab in Network > Interfaces. Create a new device. Select "bridge interface" in interface type and select the port/vlan you want.
This is such an incredibly helpful video for newcomers to OpenWRT. Very high quality an informative. The way you explain things is so clear. Thank you!
Hey man, are you a teacher?! This video is the one that I was looking for and Your explanations are GREAT! OpenWrt is not that simple (and the wiki is confusing IMO) but you make things easier. Keep it up, please !
I came across your videos today. Ive been wanting to get into more networking and your videos have given me the confidence to fianlly make the step. Going flash openwrt soon and get the ball rolling. Thank you for the time and effort you have put into these videos
Thanks for the useful diagram. Picking up OpenWRT compatible routers for $5 in the second hand market is one of my best decisions made as I can now use them as dedicated firewalls for my IoT devices even if the rest of the network runs on newer consumer grade hardware I have it in reverse where I have a mix of consumer grade router with stock firmware, dd-wrt and openwrt. The Stock firmware one has the best wifi so it stays in the center. One cable to another room is a DD-wrt box acting as an unmanaged switch with full gigabit speed, and one of the port is connected to a 100Mbps OpenWRT router with LAN firewall configured to be as strict as guest network for IoT devices only. It works great and I like the peace of mind that IoT devices cannot ping my computers Edit: I found out my DD-wrt box also supports OpenWRT and the firewall does not affect the unmanaged gigabit speed of the switch. Unified them to one device and added wireguard functionality
Kudos. Very informative video and without substantive errors on the topic, and showing the proper understanding of underlying mechanisms This is the proper way in which OpenWrt configuration should be explained.
@OneMarcFifty at the 10:39 mark you ticked the bridge interface box, in 22.03 that box no longer appears and we have to manually create a device to configure. What physical devices are you bridging by ticking that box?
Hi Randy - as such you're just creating an empty bridge where you can add devices later. In Versions 21 and later you would create a bridge under devices and then add the devices you want to the bridge.
Hi Marc, quick question for you. @10:30 you mention to Bridge Interfaces, but now on latest 22.03 version that isn't there anymore. Do we need to do something different now? The only thing I could see in regards to bridging was to select the device to "Bridge: "br-lan" (lan)" but that seems to do something different...Thank you.
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for looping back around to this! Is there any benefit to setting up a separate bridge for the guest and iot interfaces, or can they all safely use the same bridge? (i.e. why would you have set up separate ones in earlier versions?)
Thank you very much for the video. It's a pitty, it is outdated. I cannot follow with the video, because in the new openwrt version things are different, starting with creating interfaces. Is it possible to update the instructions?
Just the video I needed - can't wait for the VLAN to 2nd access point episode! I've just set up a two OpenWRT router system because of your fast roaming video.
i'm from indonesia, i didnt speak english well, need more focus to understand what the meaning of so i've watch this video again and again great job, thank for your explaining video
This is such an awsome video! I am just getting started with OpenWRT and LUCI and I have been looking for this kind of video for weeks. Love the level of detail and the screen captures.
Thanks, this was really helpful. Your explanations gave me enough info to be able to tailor everything to my own needs without being completely lost. The screens shown are a little out of date for the latest version of OpenWrt but are still quite usable.
Thank you so much for this wonderful video! At 10:25, I'm not seeing a "Bridge Interfaces" option in the current version of Luci. Proceeding to create an interface without that option shows "Device: Not Present" under status. Any idea what could be wrong?
Thanks so much for all those great video Marc.. It's really helping me to go everyday a step further on my home network. It takes time, but I will get there...
Hi Marc. I would like to see another video in this series and I believe it is a must. Setup of IGMP snooping and mDNS so devices and services can be discovered across the network. This would provide a seamless experience for the users.
Thanks for the videos! I am trying to follow you to achieve the dumb AP vlan over one cable, but when I try to create the new interface I do not see the "Bridge Interfaces" checkbox (video @ 10:44) and then when adding Interface my status shows "Device: Not Present" while you show "br-GUEST" (video @ 10:54). I am on the Belkin RT3200 snapshot r21517-d7876daf65. Anyhow, it seems maybe I missed where the device br-GUEST was created. Any ideas?
This has changed in OpenWrt 21. You now create a bridge device under Network-Interfaces-devices tab, add the Ethernet ports to it. Define an interface and attach it to the bridge. When you create a Wifi you can then attach it to the network.
@10:30 what does the enabling "Bridge interfaces" here actually do? How did it help in the "next episode" and what would have happened if we didn't enable it? BTW: GREAT OpenWRT explanation. Firewall Zones on OpenWRT is a hard topic for me, but now I more or less get it.
Mainly "enabling bridge" in OpenWrt 19 links the interface to a bridge rather than one single interface. The advantage is that you can add multiple devices (Ethernet, VLANs, Wireless) to one single interface rather than have one single interface. Things have changed in OpenWrt 21 as well w/r to the separation of "interface" and "device"
Another great video. I've been reading documentation for days to find out what and how I have to configure a OpenWrt router. Just like Franceso Pocci, I find the OpenWrt documentary very confusing. Only when you understand how it works can you understand it :( And like Colin Nicholson, I'm excited about the expansion to include VLANs. You have a talent for explaining complicated things simply. Great. And that with the proverbial "German thoroughness" Last night I managed to flash my Archer C7 on OpenWrt. Had the latest TP-Link firmware and unfortunately only worked with TFTP. It took me a long time to find out that media sensing was the problem to get TFTP to work. :( I'm going to do the configuration right now. I will try myself to get VLAN working too... Many greetings from Braunschweig to Berlin
@@OneMarcFifty Got VLAN's for IOT / Guest work on my Archer C7 :) LAN Ports and Wireless works as expected. Thanks to your video "Building a managed switch with OpenWrt on old Wifi Router" Next step is to add an additional dump AP with VLAN support, fast roaming, ...
I would like to see another episode on the topic. Extended firewall configuration according to the blacklist principle when using VLANs. E.g. allow HTTP / HTTPS from LAN / Guest zones, but stop sending SMB packets over the WAN interface.
Hi, you are a great trainer. Your explanations are clear and calm. I do have a problem.. I followed your steps but I run into some issues: 1) any cable I plug in the router LAN ports seem to be routed to guest lan. 2) also the normal wifi is routed to Guest lan. I checked and rechecked your video and I dont seem to do anything different. I use Luci 21.02. Do you think that has different settings? I must say that the GUI is just a bit different an so some of the options. Any chance you can review this tutorial with the latest Luci? or give me some suggestions? Thank you
Hi, first off - many thanks for your feed-back! Actually yes, things have changed in OpenWrt 21 and more importantly with Linux Kerne 5 and the way VLANs are handled - the new DSA architecture is customized on the interface itself, there is no "switch" menu item any more. I'l see if I can update the series.
This is a great video, and I used it to setup my home network with just a few customizations, but I just tried this again using OpenWRT 22.x and the changes are just too important, especially the missing "Bridge Interfaces" option which also breaks the wireless network setup. Can you please consider updating this video with a 22.x version? Thank you.
The action is accept because we want to allow the devices to query DNS and get a DHCP address. The default is reject already and this rule is the exception. If you don't see network-switch and wireless - does your device _have_ a switch and wireless adapter ? Which hardware ? Which OpenWrt version ? You are running this on a router, not in a VM right ?
@@OneMarcFifty I got it. I confused the GuestZone with the IOTZone. Action must be accepted of course. Am actually running the OpenWrt on a VM. You mean this video explains the OpenWrt on a physical router only?
Well - you can do everything on a VM except hardware-related stuff. Unless you passed the hardware through to the VM. You can use all the firewall rules and parts in a VM but as you correctly stated if you want to do Wifi etc then you would need to pass through corresponding hardware
@@OneMarcFifty Got it. Thank you Marc. It would be great when you point to that explicitly in your video description to avoid any confusion. Also when you add in the description the link to your predecessor video. Because your videos build on each other so that we viewers can follow them through. Anyway you do a great job here. Thanks for that.
Thank you very much for your videos, they were really helpful for setting up OpenWRT :) Quick question: How can we isolate devices from each other in the guest network? I have created a bridge device br-guest bridging br-lan.3 and bat0.3 (I use batman-adv) and added it to the guest network. Communication between lan and guest is blocked, however the devices in guest can see and access each other. Checking AP isolation on the radios and bat0 seems to change nothing. On DD-WRT i had to manually setup ebtables. Is there any way to set this up with luci? Thanks a lot!
I have not yet found a good way to do this. If you set up Wi-fi isolation, it will work on one AP but not over many APs. Firewall-wise you can't really define such a rule in LuCI. You would need to come up with some rule based on the MAC addresses (deny all traffic from GUEST except to the router itself).
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for your response! I have researched a bit and found some ways to achieve this. One easy and efficient way would be to enable VLAN filtering in the br-guest settings and simply setting 1 PVID Egress untagged on each Port there. This would effectively deny all local communication on that bridge. However there are two problems: Using batman-adv on nodes, this would also deny communication to the gateway router via bat0.3. Also, there is currently a problem with the bcm4366 driver (?), where wifi does not work on bridges with VLAN filtering enabled. I did the following to achieve this goal: - Enable AP isolation on guest Wifis on each node - Install ebtables-nft and add the following to the startup of the gateway router: ebtables -A FORWARD -logical-in br-guest -logical-out br-guest -j DROP - Add this to the startup of all other nodes that are connected via batman-adv: ebtables -A FORWARD -logical-in br-guest -logical-out br-guest -in-if ! bat0.3 -out-if ! bat0.3 -j DROP I read a lot online that ebtables is quite inefficient, however this is the only way that worked for me. I didn’t notice any performance degradation doing this.
Very enlightening! What if i have an NVR and connected it the IOT wifi, will it be able to notify me incase I turned on the Detect Motion and Notify me. Thanks and More Power!
Hi, thanks for your comment - I personally like to do notifications over network boundaries with MQTT - for this I have Mosquitto running on my router which is accessible from all network segments
Hi, that was more or less just an assumption. Looking at what 99% of the users are doing, they would presumably only have one subnet in the LAN zone. If you had for example 192.168.4.0/24 and 192.168.5.0/24 _both_ in the same zone and you would want to allow forwarding traffic from one zone to the other, then you would need to set forwarding to allowed. If not, set it to drop or reject. So it's more about network isolation _within_ one zone.
Marc - great content really enjoyed it. Just one observation in relation to the OpenWrt firewall gui screen and your comments around 6:30. Earlier in the video you explained nicely about the different tables and chains involved but your comment about ignoring the forward chain setting on the right hand side of the screen threw me at first. You are basically saying ignore it (in fact I could just set the forward action to reject) as it has no effect at all as you should actually control forwarding through the edit menu function and by how you configure the two drop down menus at the bottom of the screen i.e. "allow forward to destination zones" and "allow forward from source zones". Just thought I would check my understanding is correct? thanks again
Hi - many thanks for asking ! I had to look it up before I made the video ;-) the third setting on the right is actually forwarding WITHIN the zone, i.e. if you had multiple networks inside the LAN zone and would want to allow or deny forwarding between them. So it's INSIDE one given zone. The setting that we change in the vieo is the forwarding BETWEEN zones, i.e. from one zone to another ;-) Great question - many thanks for your feedback !!!!
Just to double check two things at 5:32 when you say that the output is set by default so the router may access all other zones, can you think of a scenario where you wouldn't wat that to happen? Also at 5:40 you mention that everything is kept its in own zone, do you mean that everything its kept in its own network within the zone that the forward policy is applied to? Want to make sure my understanding is correct, thanks again for the wonderful vids!
Hi Marc. First of all your videos are very helpful and I'm great full for you putting in the time in teaching. However, I'm having an issue that didn't work on my end (7:08 mark). I followed everything on the guest zone, then I tried on that zone with my laptop to see if it works but, it let me ssh. I must've missed a step. I watched the video over a bunch of times. And I can't seem to get out of this loop.
Hi Drew, are you saying that you _can_ ssh into the router's guest IP even though your expectation is that you can't ? Presumably then you are connecting to the router over the LAN and not the GUEST network ? Even connecting to another IP _on_ the router would NOT go through the forward chain but through the INPUT chain of the network that you are connecting from. So if you connect from LAN, then yes - you can ssh to the guest's IP address. ut you can't do that if you come FROM guest.
Yes, as Marc has said, simply put: your laptop needs to be connected ONLY on your Guest Network for this to work (well, not work for the SSH part heh) if you're plugged in with ethernet, you need to make sure that port is a Guest only port and not a LAN port (via Switch>VLAN ID).
Hi - I'd like to add a comment that took me hours of frustration. The 'interface' names need to be created in lowercase - otherwise there will be no IP assigned even if it's setup properly. I didn't try all capital - but a mix of lower/upper case resulted in a connection to the guest network, but no internet/obtained IP. One thing I can't get working, is connecting over wifi to the "IOT" wifi network. Was that not the intention based on these instructions? Basically, I wanted a separate "guest" network for IOT devices that can't see my LAN. I can connect to the "GUEST" network fine, but not the "IOT" one.
Hi there , At 01:07 in firewall rule WAN =Reject input = reject output= accept forward = reject . this rule means all incoming traffic to our network is blocked or reject but from inside of the network any one can access to the internet? am I right ??
Correct. the first setting (WAN => Reject) means that we do not forward from the WAN to any other zone. (Input=reject) means, that traffic from the WAN can't reach processes on the router. (Output=accept) means that processes running on the router can go to the WAN. (forward=reject) only means that we would not forward traffic from one segment in the WAN to another Segment in the WAN. Internet Access from the LAN is set in the line above, where we allow zone forwarding (LAN => WAN).
Hi, thank you for sharing this info, question, is there a way for Block access using MAC Filtering , I just want to allow wireless connection for those devices with MAC address in my list. Regards !
I only have 2 radios, so I created my primary and Guest network as described in the video. I'd like an IOT network, so how can I create a second network on one of the radios?
You can create multiple networks on one radio just by clicking on "Add" next to the radio under Network-Wireless. I have 6 SSIDs running here per radio.
Nice explanation. I just flashed openwrt to my router. I have a raspberry Pi running multiple applications on docker connected via ethernet. They all have unique IP's on my LAN ( by creating a macvlan network). Is it possible to isolate one application (using one unique lan ip) so that it cannot access other LAN devices?
Hi Aditya, that scenario would require the implementation of VLANs on the host and then binding the docker containers to the separate VLANs (e.g. eth0.3 / eth0.4)
I had an IOT WiFI access point, with its own SSID and password but associated with LAN (so not network separation). I followed most of the setup here to use a separate zone: ping works but my Kasa switches are no longer acessible. This is because broadcast is used to retrieve the switches, but local broadcast does not reach the IOT (different address space). I found the udp-broadcast-relay-redux package, which does exactly what I need. If I launch it by hand to forward LAN broadcat requests to the IOT zone, then everything works. I checked and found that this was installed as a service, with a UCI-style configuration in /etc/config. However, no matter how I configure it, it does not start any instance of udp-broadcast-relay-redux. No error shown in the log either. After looking at the init script, I found that I needed to fill the "Service" attribute of the IOT interface: now "uci get network.IOT.device" returns the proper value, but the service instance still does not start. My contribution to call to action: a tutorial on how to make udp-broadcast-relay-redux work would be really nice. PS: I followed the demonstrated setup, and it worked fine (beside the broadcast issue, which I should have anticipated), even while the "Bridge Interface" option was not visible in Lucy. I understand this option was only enabled for future setups, and I guess that this is no longer needed.
@@OneMarcFifty I am sorry to report that I did undo the separate firewall zone, and hooked my IOT access point back to the LAN interface. The main issue has been how to setup new devices without access to the Internet. A secondary issue are the difficulties with configuring or using udp-broadcast-relay-redux. I could have setup temporary firewall rules to allow Internet access while installing new devices, but that represents an additional headache. Call to action: a video to explain the best approaches for installing new home automation devices on an IOT network without Internet access. 🙂
Well explained and sumarized the firewall concept of openwrt, not available in utube though it is in openwrt forum scattered in bits and pieces. Looking for videos on : 1. parent contro traffic rules, esp this pandemic season it all the more imperative. Kids are smart with their whack a mole device outwits the tagged IP or MAC in traffic rules. 2. Access openwrt router from internet (we have one of the wifi tagged to OpenVPN). No videos on this in you tube. Hope there would be enough requests for these and would be helpful to mmany openwrt users. Thanks in advance.
Many thanks for your feedback @Ranish and thank you for the suggestions - port forwarding is on my list but parental control was not - I‘ll have a look into options (hint: give your kids a separate Wifi in a separate FW zone, this is resistant against ip/mac changes)
Thank you for this tutorial good Sir! This is verify helpful to me. Just want to add 1 question Sir. Is there a way to separate browsing (wanA) and gaming (wanB) on different wan interfaces with a failover option?
Yes you can do that. Just define two lan interfaces, attach a wifi to each one and define the same or different firewall rules for each (basically allow forward to wan)
If you isolate devices on IOT network from the internet, how do you control them from an app on your mobile device? Case in point: I have IP cams I would like to 1) isolate from my LAN 2) stop from "phoning home" and 3) still control/receive notifications from when at and away from home LAN
Hi - the main reason for me isolating my IOT devices is that I didn't have any cloud based IOT devices at the time of making the video (All my IOT devices where more or less DIY solutions based on ESP8266 / ESP32 at the time). I do in the meantime have some cloud devices, but I moved them again to a separate VLAN - All you'd have to do in order to adapt is add internet access to the IOT zone really.
Hi, great videos. One question though, why does your IoT network have access to the router interface/login page? I had a rogue IoT device previously attempting user/Pw combinations, I really want to avoid this. How would I block them from seeing my router? You also said you don't want devices on your IoT network to phone home. How would they continue to work if blocked from WAN? E.g blink cameras, nest doorbells etc as they need Internet?
Hi Will, mainly this was just for the sake of simplification. You could as well set the default Input to "drop" and then enable only needed services (such as DNS, DHCP, maybe NTP). W/r to internet access - the IOT devices that I use are no cloud devices. They are mainly DIY devices built with ESP8266 or ESP32 micro controllers and don't need internet access. My vacuum cleaner is an exception. It does need internet access and is in a separate DMZ.
Hi, many thanks for the suggestion - following your comment I have re-watched the video - it's true that some things have changed in OpenWrt 21 - especially with bridging and how we assign the Wi-fi etc.... Need to think this over ;-)
@@user-il6dq7kh5k If you only have the wi-fi on this interface and nothing else, then you don't need a bridge. A bridge is only needed if multiple devices should be on the same network interface (e.g. an Ethernet port and Wifi)
@@user-il6dq7kh5k Just a habit I guess - usually you wouldn't need Ethernet ports on Guest. But if I have the bridge, then I can just do it without too many changes.
Thanks for the great content. I followed the procedure and put iot devices as well as my printer into a different subnet. Now my computer can't find the printer. Could you please tell me how to make my printer accessible by my computer and mobile phones?
You'd need an mdns repeater/IGMP proxy style of software in order to use Airprint and the like so that your phone sees the printer. Omcproxy might do the trick or else mdns-repeater in a linux container or Avahi with echo function. Plus you need to allow ports 9100, 631, 443 TCP and 5353 UDP to the printer
Really well organized and informative! Thanks so much! Just wanted to clarify around the 8:52 mark: If I want to separate these rules, wouldn’t DNS be using UDP and DHCP using TCP? I think you might have flipped them.
I am actually simplifying the rule in order to just use one. I open both protocols tcp and udp on both ports. But because there is nothing else on the opposite protocol there should be no risk to that.
@@OneMarcFifty According Wikipedia, looks only need open port 67 for DHCP cause port 68 only use to reply to client, so it not necessary. zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8A%A8%E6%80%81%E4%B8%BB%E6%9C%BA%E8%AE%BE%E7%BD%AE%E5%8D%8F%E8%AE%AE
@@OneMarcFifty You said that DNS uses only TCP. False! DNS uses UDP unless answer is too big to be delivered over UDP, in which case server tells client to connect again using TCP.
After many hours of struggling with OpenWRT in the past months, finally came back to it and re-watched your series on OpenWRT, I think I have a handle on it now (which probably means I don't understand it 🙂 ), and now have Guest Access points and its all working well..... its a steep learning curve with Openwrt, didn't get the fundamental building blocks of "interfaces" and how they relate to the router, to physicall ports and other network dark arts, but its now making much more sense. Many thanks Marc....
Hi Tony, glad to hear that the videos helped bringing pieces together. It's true that every software has their own look and feel and also - I'd say "philosophy" of looking at things. the main thing I personally struggle with products that are new to me seems to be exactly what you describe - getting my head around the "way of thinking" - or building blocks like you called it. Don't give up ;-)
Thank you for the great content! I would like to know a bit more, how do you configure the provider's router LAN output and the first OpenWRT WAN input area? Do you allow the provider's router to make the NAT? Or will it be done also in the OperWRT?
In my case, I just set the WAN interface of OpenWrt to DHCP, i.e. I let the ISP do NAT. From a performance standpoint not the best solution but the easiest to implement as from the ISP router's standpoint it looks like there is just one client.
Great video, i'm often refering to it whenever my memory fail me :) I do have a question: On my iot zone, how would you enable smtp only to go through wan so my wireless cameras can send me emails on events. Your instructions on iot zone restrict access globally under zone forwarding proving no wan access. Would you go the by the trafics rules instead to permit only smtp protocol. Thank again for your great tutorial.
Thank you for the video! I have set up a guest wifi on my Openwrt 19.07 router. Everything works as it should, and the guest clients connected to the guest SSID cannot ping LuCi or any other IPs in the LAN zone. BUT I want the guests to be able to communicate with one IP in the LAN zone, a brother network printer. I checked what common ports are used for network printers and I have set up a traffic rule allowing use use of those ports only to the IP of the printer in the LAN zone. But I cannot access it from the guest clients. Only if I allow "Forward to destination zone LAN" in the firewall zone settings in the guest zone, the devices in the guest zone is allowed to reach the printer, but then they can access the rest of the IPs in the LAN zone as well. How can I make the traffic rule somehow override the Firewall zone settings?
Create a traffic rule (Network - Firewall - Traffic rules). Set the protocol to TCP. Source Zone to GUEST, do NOT add a source IP. Set the destination Zone to LAN, specify the IP of your printer in the "Destination address" drop down. Specify the destination ports (e.g. "9100 631 515 443") and set the Action to "accept". Make sure that the rule is ABOVE any other deny rule (i.e. move it to the top of the list).
Hey Mac, question you might be able to answer - I have my access point set to AC mode on 5Ghz, but my devices don't seem to connect on that mode. I have one device with an AX WiFi chip which connects via 802.11a band and a device with an AC WiFi chip which connects on 802.11n. How can I make them connect on AC, and how can I confirm my access point is correctly broadcasting AC?
Hi - in order to check what the access points are broadcasting I suggest running "iw scan" on a Linux workstation with Wifi hardware. That will show you everything.
Great video helped out a lot as openwrt does things differently than other custom firmwares. One thing though my tv won’t connect to the IOT wifi I created is it due to way the forwarding because the tv needs an wan connection? Or am I understanding this wrong.
question, would you class android streaming boxes and Chromecast googletv as IOTZone worthy and what about making casting work in this type of configuration?
Hi, I have added my Multimedia devices (Kodi, bluray player, TV Sets and the like) into a separate Multimedia Zone. Getting mDNS and broadcasts to work requires a lot of fine tuning and configuration... not easy ;-(
if I set up the IOT as described here, my IOT devices become useless as far as I understand. If I use Home Assistant or any other IOT server located in the home network, according to my understanding, the devices are now isolated in such a way that they cannot transmit information to the HA. How do you solve this problem?
Hi, it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want your devices to be discoverable by HA then HA needs to have a leg in that network segment. You could therefore assign an additional network interface to the HA Server and modify routes/forwarding etc. or you could define routes on the router allowing HA access into that segment. Alternatively (this is my use case with FHEM, but would work with any Home Automation that supports MQTT) - install Mosquitto on the router and have the IOT devices communicate with HA over MQTT. Mosquitto would listen and broadcast in all segments and hence be an application gateway or middleware for all home automation over all network segments without exposing devices or http interfaces and the like.
i want to open the iot network for mqtt at port 1883 for the lan network, so that my iot devices can send packages to a mqtt broker which is in lan. I dont know how to handle it.
Marc, great video, convinced me to move to OpenWRT with all my thought to restrict the local devices I have as much as possible. One question though - why not restricting IoT devices to access my router? I'm not an expert, but doesn't those smart plugs represent a trojan horse for someone who knows what to do with them once they can ssh to my router? What if we "reject their input" and create the same rules as for Guest Network with DHCP rule only?
Hi Vadim, valid approach. There is no 100% Security ;-) If someone takes over your router then you might have a whole bunch of other problems as well ;-)
Hi Marc, thanks for the video, it really helped me a lot! I have one question about my specific setup. I have one device which needs to be able to talk to all iot devices, the iot devices need to be able to talk to that one device and this but only this one device needs to be able to access the wan zone. Right now I located that one device in the iot zone but don't know how to setup a rule so that this one device can access the wan. Can you help me with this one? Thank you!
Go to Network-Firewall-Traffic rules, add a new rule. Name "IOT exception", protocol : TCP/UDP or whatever you need, Source Zone: IOT, Source Address: Select the device that should be able to talk to the internet. Destination Zone: WAN, Action: accept. Mae sure that rule is at the top of the list or at least before any deny rule, save and apply ;-)
Hi Mark! In openwrt version 22.0.3, when creating a network interface, you need to select a device. Apparently for the guest and IOT you need to create a new device?
Either you create a device for each VLAN (eth0.44 or the like), add it to a new bridge or you can use Distributed Switch architecture DSA. There is a video about VLANs on version 21 on my channel page
First of all, I would like to thank you. And I would like to ad just one small thing. I forgot the rule for the IOT-DHCP part in the firewall configuration section. Without it the IOT devices will never get the IP addresses 😀
Hi Martin, "input" is stuff going to processes on the router. "Output" is stuff coming from a process on the router. LAN/WAN etc. just defines the zone where the packets go to or come from. So each zone has their own input/output rule really.
Hi thanks for the tutorial. Very well done. I have a question: since I follow the tutoria and created the 2interfaces for IOT and guest, all my physical ports seems to fall under the IOT DHCP server. What am I doing wrong?
@@OneMarcFifty 21 (yes, i noticed some differences) for the rest it all works. But at the moment i have to create static leases to make sure my devices stay in the correct subnet
Marc, I have a use case where a guest on the Guest lan needs access to a printer on the LAN lan. I've tried adding a firewall traffic rule to allow access to the printer ip address from the Guest lan. This doesn't work as it appears the general lan to guestZone forwarding rule is executed first and blocks all traffic from the Guest lan to the LAN lan. How do you handle forwarding exceptions to the general zone forwarding rules?
@@OneMarcFifty it’s silly but after a 15 year career at big tech companies in Silicon Valley, this is the video which made iptables finally click in my head! Would love to see a deeper dive, I feel like you have a lot to share.
Great channel, Great instruction too but for the life of me just could not get this tutorial to work on a Linksys EA3500 running OpenWRT 21.02.3. That said, OpenWRT's Guest WiFi Basics CLI command list also would not work which may mean the issue is with the router (or the seat to kybd interface).
Hi Greg, some things have changed in OpenWrt 21 (what you have) as opposed to 19 (the video). Mainly bridging is done on the device tab under network-interfaces and you would then select the bridge as a device under your interface. Your Wi-fi is then added to that network.
Can you install some Linux Containers or some virtualized machines with OpenWrt - e.g. by configuration of the different network settings for the Linux Containers such as Host, Bridge, MacVLAN, IPVLAN, Isolated, Custom etc. with OpenWrt?
@@OneMarcFifty How can I run Docker and/or Qemu or Linux Containers like Promox Containers on OpenWrt, if you use x86 or x86-64 hardware? If macVLAN is bad, because it can cause problems for securit reasons, how should I solve this problem?
Actually, it's not so much the MacVLAN network that would be bad, but rather you would need to make sure that you don't bind anything to the WAN adapter inadvertently. As long as you bind to the LAN you should be fine.
Thanks for the explanation, it was very clear. I have been fooled by that double "forward" setting! If I can ask, what hardware did you use to install OpenWRT on?
Yeah, that one is hard to explain because the terms are so similar. Honestly I can’t remember which hardware I used for the video - one of Archer C7, D-Link dir2660 or potentially a VM.
Running 22.03, and setting up a zone to reject input, let's say from a guest network, is yielding all devices on the interface, in that zone, with the inability to get a IP from the DHCP server. In order for the devices to connect to the internet, they need to be configured on the device end to have a static IP within the range... I think openWRT in a update changed the way these firewall zone rules work?
Hi JB, many thanks ;-) I'll need to have a look at NAT networks and possible videos on that - comes up quite often. But none for the time being I'm afraid ;-( th-cam.com/channels/G5Ph9Mm6UEQLJJ-kGIC2AQ.html
Would you mind sharing what router models you use/suggest for the Router/Firewall and Access Point Devices? Thanks for these videos, I've been struggling in vain to do a similar setup using dd-wrt.
Hi Andrew, in the video I had been using Archer C7's but I have replaced them with D-Link DIR-2660's these days. You might want to check my video on Router models here: th-cam.com/video/wP1ZcQBLL1k/w-d-xo.html
Marc, do I need to add a new interface for each Vlan ID I want my router to recognize or is adding it on the "Switch" page enough? And also do i add firewall zone settings for each? I may be thinking too complicated for this and it's much simpler than I thought
Hi! Actions ACCEPT, REJECT ... etc. are used when we talk about rules in the chain (with appropriate criteria for a packet in these rules) but not to the chain itself. How it can be understood? Does it mean that chosen action is applied for all rules in the chain? Thank you!
Hi Aleksandr, those rules are default settings, i.e. they apply for everything. If you want then you can have exceptions in the traffic rules and be more specific on Source IP, Destination IP and many more.
Hey there. I know that this video is 3 years old. But I'm trying to add another IOT zone for things like smart tv that still needs to connect to internet. From my understanding from your video, I needed to create an IOT zone but with almost the same settings with guest. The problem I am having is I cannot cast from my main SSID to the SSID of the IOT with the internet.
You definitely have some of the best videos I have come across on OpenWRT.
Wow, thanks!
Still true! Great stuff.
Yeah! Far less TH-cam content on OpenWRT than on pfSense. Marc is a blessing!
I've been needing this video for months. I've found OpenWRT to be so confusing. This is explaining exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you so much.
great video, clear and amazingly helpful. in openwrt 22.03.5, the "bridge interfaces" checkbox in the "add new interface" menu is no longer there, is there something i need to do in this version to acheive the same thing?
They moved the functionality to the "devices" tab in Network > Interfaces. Create a new device. Select "bridge interface" in interface type and select the port/vlan you want.
This is such an incredibly helpful video for newcomers to OpenWRT. Very high quality an informative. The way you explain things is so clear. Thank you!
Many thanks Colin !
Hey man, are you a teacher?! This video is the one that I was looking for and Your explanations are GREAT! OpenWrt is not that simple (and the wiki is confusing IMO) but you make things easier. Keep it up, please !
Hi Francesco, no I am not a teacher 😉, I just love to explain things - all I’m doing on this channel is that I share my own learnings really.
OMG! Your explanation of the firewall in OpenWRT was the final piece in the puzzle for me - it all clicked with this video, thank you
Awesome - I am glad it helped ;-)
I came across your videos today. Ive been wanting to get into more networking and your videos have given me the confidence to fianlly make the step. Going flash openwrt soon and get the ball rolling. Thank you for the time and effort you have put into these videos
Simple and effective explanation by covering the audience from beginners to advanced.
Thank you very much for your feedback ;-)
Thanks for the useful diagram. Picking up OpenWRT compatible routers for $5 in the second hand market is one of my best decisions made as I can now use them as dedicated firewalls for my IoT devices even if the rest of the network runs on newer consumer grade hardware
I have it in reverse where I have a mix of consumer grade router with stock firmware, dd-wrt and openwrt. The Stock firmware one has the best wifi so it stays in the center. One cable to another room is a DD-wrt box acting as an unmanaged switch with full gigabit speed, and one of the port is connected to a 100Mbps OpenWRT router with LAN firewall configured to be as strict as guest network for IoT devices only. It works great and I like the peace of mind that IoT devices cannot ping my computers
Edit: I found out my DD-wrt box also supports OpenWRT and the firewall does not affect the unmanaged gigabit speed of the switch. Unified them to one device and added wireguard functionality
Best set up video for beginner to achieve a perfect network settings with full understanding of how the os does this.
Kudos. Very informative video and without substantive errors on the topic, and showing the proper understanding of underlying mechanisms This is the proper way in which OpenWrt configuration should be explained.
Many thanks for your friendly feedback!!!
This is the best channel on Openwrt and some more, please continue !
Many thanks for your kind feedback. There will be more to come. I have taken some days off in August and will definitely produce more ;-)
@OneMarcFifty at the 10:39 mark you ticked the bridge interface box, in 22.03 that box no longer appears and we have to manually create a device to configure. What physical devices are you bridging by ticking that box?
Hi Randy - as such you're just creating an empty bridge where you can add devices later. In Versions 21 and later you would create a bridge under devices and then add the devices you want to the bridge.
Hi Marc, quick question for you. @10:30 you mention to Bridge Interfaces, but now on latest 22.03 version that isn't there anymore. Do we need to do something different now? The only thing I could see in regards to bridging was to select the device to "Bridge: "br-lan" (lan)" but that seems to do something different...Thank you.
Yes, you can use br-lan or any other bridge that you create under the devices tab. That does the same.
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for looping back around to this! Is there any benefit to setting up a separate bridge for the guest and iot interfaces, or can they all safely use the same bridge? (i.e. why would you have set up separate ones in earlier versions?)
Darn, your videos are so clear and well-presented.
Thank you very much for the video. It's a pitty, it is outdated. I cannot follow with the video, because in the new openwrt version things are different, starting with creating interfaces. Is it possible to update the instructions?
Just the video I needed - can't wait for the VLAN to 2nd access point episode! I've just set up a two OpenWRT router system because of your fast roaming video.
Many thanks Colin! Perfect timing ;-) I hope that I get this ready until next monday. But it will come _very_ soon.
i'm from indonesia, i didnt speak english well, need more focus to understand what the meaning of
so i've watch this video again and again
great job, thank for your explaining video
Hi, many thanks for your feedback. Please check out the subtitles. You should be able to use automatic translation to Indonesian.
This is such an awsome video! I am just getting started with OpenWRT and LUCI and I have been looking for this kind of video for weeks. Love the level of detail and the screen captures.
Hi Lionel, many thanks - I am glad that you like it !
To be honest, brilliant!
It's not only that you explain it simple and brilliant, in addition you really lern!
Hi Christian, many thanks - glad you like it ;-)
Thanks, this was really helpful. Your explanations gave me enough info to be able to tailor everything to my own needs without being completely lost. The screens shown are a little out of date for the latest version of OpenWrt but are still quite usable.
Hi, many thanks for the feedback - there's newer videos on OpenWrt 21 on my channel https:/th-cam.com/users/onemarcfifty
You are doing exactly what I am trying to do. Thank you for the clear explanation!
Awesome- thanks a lot!
Thank you so much for this wonderful video!
At 10:25, I'm not seeing a "Bridge Interfaces" option in the current version of Luci. Proceeding to create an interface without that option shows "Device: Not Present" under status. Any idea what could be wrong?
I have the same problem. Did you resolved?
Things have changed in OpenWrt 21 - video is in the making and will come out in December !
@@sidbyron210 Yes, I managed to resolve it. I created separate VLANs and used them.
@@OneMarcFifty Am I correct that I can just create a custom device named br-GUEST and br-IOT?
@@OneMarcFifty Hello, did you ever make this video? I am stuck at this part. Thank you!
Thanks so much for all those great video Marc.. It's really helping me to go everyday a step further on my home network. It takes time, but I will get there...
Awesome, many thanks for your feedback!
Definetly one of the best videos on OpenWrt Firewall settings. Thanks a lot! brillant.
Thank you very much !
Hi Marc. I would like to see another video in this series and I believe it is a must. Setup of IGMP snooping and mDNS so devices and services can be discovered across the network. This would provide a seamless experience for the users.
Hi, definitely. mdns and IGMP are on my list - but unfortunately not at the very top ;-( The use case would be airprint / airplay etc.
@@OneMarcFifty also this would be beneficial when using smart home apps like home-assistant, where devices discovery is very convenient
Thanks for the videos! I am trying to follow you to achieve the dumb AP vlan over one cable, but when I try to create the new interface I do not see the "Bridge Interfaces" checkbox (video @ 10:44) and then when adding Interface my status shows "Device: Not Present" while you show "br-GUEST" (video @ 10:54). I am on the Belkin RT3200 snapshot r21517-d7876daf65. Anyhow, it seems maybe I missed where the device br-GUEST was created. Any ideas?
This has changed in OpenWrt 21. You now create a bridge device under Network-Interfaces-devices tab, add the Ethernet ports to it. Define an interface and attach it to the bridge. When you create a Wifi you can then attach it to the network.
@10:30 what does the enabling "Bridge interfaces" here actually do? How did it help in the "next episode" and what would have happened if we didn't enable it?
BTW: GREAT OpenWRT explanation. Firewall Zones on OpenWRT is a hard topic for me, but now I more or less get it.
Mainly "enabling bridge" in OpenWrt 19 links the interface to a bridge rather than one single interface. The advantage is that you can add multiple devices (Ethernet, VLANs, Wireless) to one single interface rather than have one single interface. Things have changed in OpenWrt 21 as well w/r to the separation of "interface" and "device"
Another great video.
I've been reading documentation for days to find out what and how I have to configure a OpenWrt router. Just like Franceso Pocci, I find the OpenWrt documentary very confusing. Only when you understand how it works can you understand it :(
And like Colin Nicholson, I'm excited about the expansion to include VLANs.
You have a talent for explaining complicated things simply. Great. And that with the proverbial "German thoroughness"
Last night I managed to flash my Archer C7 on OpenWrt. Had the latest TP-Link firmware and unfortunately only worked with TFTP. It took me a long time to find out that media sensing was the problem to get TFTP to work. :(
I'm going to do the configuration right now. I will try myself to get VLAN working too...
Many greetings from Braunschweig to Berlin
Many thanks for your kind feedback!
@@OneMarcFifty
Got VLAN's for IOT / Guest work on my Archer C7 :)
LAN Ports and Wireless works as expected. Thanks to your video "Building a managed switch with OpenWrt on old Wifi Router"
Next step is to add an additional dump AP with VLAN support, fast roaming, ...
I would like to see another episode on the topic. Extended firewall configuration according to the blacklist principle when using VLANs.
E.g. allow HTTP / HTTPS from LAN / Guest zones, but stop sending SMB packets over the WAN interface.
Super knackig erklärt. Vielen Dank. Genau danach habe ich gesucht. Sehr guter Content.
That was excellent - thank you for demystifying openwrt firewall settings
Thank you very much!
I am *completely* in agreement with you about the need to block IOT devices from phoning home.
Many thanks for the feedback ;-)
Hi, you are a great trainer. Your explanations are clear and calm.
I do have a problem.. I followed your steps but I run into some issues:
1) any cable I plug in the router LAN ports seem to be routed to guest lan.
2) also the normal wifi is routed to Guest lan.
I checked and rechecked your video and I dont seem to do anything different.
I use Luci 21.02. Do you think that has different settings?
I must say that the GUI is just a bit different an so some of the options.
Any chance you can review this tutorial with the latest Luci? or give me some suggestions?
Thank you
That's true there is new framework called DSA instead swconfig from video. it's quite embarrassing for newcomers like me too.
Hi, first off - many thanks for your feed-back! Actually yes, things have changed in OpenWrt 21 and more importantly with Linux Kerne 5 and the way VLANs are handled - the new DSA architecture is customized on the interface itself, there is no "switch" menu item any more. I'l see if I can update the series.
Ah - saw your reply - yes correct - DSA requires configuration on the interface itself. I'll take a note of this and update as soon as I can.
This is a great video, and I used it to setup my home network with just a few customizations, but I just tried this again using OpenWRT 22.x and the changes are just too important, especially the missing "Bridge Interfaces" option which also breaks the wireless network setup. Can you please consider updating this video with a 22.x version? Thank you.
It’s true - things have changed a bit. I’ll probably do some follow up as soon as the remaining dependencies to iptables will have been removed
@@OneMarcFifty Please confirm can we overcome this by using a specified bridge e.g. br-lan? or I am missing something
9:12 Why is the Action "accepted"? Shouldn't it be "rejected"?
10:51 I don't see the menu items Network-> Wireless and Network -> Switch.
The action is accept because we want to allow the devices to query DNS and get a DHCP address. The default is reject already and this rule is the exception. If you don't see network-switch and wireless - does your device _have_ a switch and wireless adapter ? Which hardware ? Which OpenWrt version ? You are running this on a router, not in a VM right ?
@@OneMarcFifty I got it. I confused the GuestZone with the IOTZone. Action must be accepted of course. Am actually running the OpenWrt on a VM. You mean this video explains the OpenWrt on a physical router only?
Well - you can do everything on a VM except hardware-related stuff. Unless you passed the hardware through to the VM. You can use all the firewall rules and parts in a VM but as you correctly stated if you want to do Wifi etc then you would need to pass through corresponding hardware
@@OneMarcFifty Got it. Thank you Marc. It would be great when you point to that explicitly in your video description to avoid any confusion. Also when you add in the description the link to your predecessor video. Because your videos build on each other so that we viewers can follow them through. Anyway you do a great job here. Thanks for that.
Great tip, many thanks!
Thank you for that great explanation of firewall rules! I really needed this. Great work!
You're very welcome! Glad you liked it !
Thank you very much for your videos, they were really helpful for setting up OpenWRT :)
Quick question: How can we isolate devices from each other in the guest network? I have created a bridge device br-guest bridging br-lan.3 and bat0.3 (I use batman-adv) and added it to the guest network. Communication between lan and guest is blocked, however the devices in guest can see and access each other. Checking AP isolation on the radios and bat0 seems to change nothing. On DD-WRT i had to manually setup ebtables. Is there any way to set this up with luci? Thanks a lot!
I have not yet found a good way to do this. If you set up Wi-fi isolation, it will work on one AP but not over many APs. Firewall-wise you can't really define such a rule in LuCI. You would need to come up with some rule based on the MAC addresses (deny all traffic from GUEST except to the router itself).
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for your response! I have researched a bit and found some ways to achieve this. One easy and efficient way would be to enable VLAN filtering in the br-guest settings and simply setting 1 PVID Egress untagged on each Port there. This would effectively deny all local communication on that bridge. However there are two problems: Using batman-adv on nodes, this would also deny communication to the gateway router via bat0.3. Also, there is currently a problem with the bcm4366 driver (?), where wifi does not work on bridges with VLAN filtering enabled.
I did the following to achieve this goal:
- Enable AP isolation on guest Wifis on each node
- Install ebtables-nft and add the following to the startup of the gateway router:
ebtables -A FORWARD -logical-in br-guest -logical-out br-guest -j DROP
- Add this to the startup of all other nodes that are connected via batman-adv:
ebtables -A FORWARD -logical-in br-guest -logical-out br-guest -in-if ! bat0.3 -out-if ! bat0.3 -j DROP
I read a lot online that ebtables is quite inefficient, however this is the only way that worked for me. I didn’t notice any performance degradation doing this.
Great one! I’ll add that to my router for testing as soon as I can - thanks for sharing!
I think I should follow all the instructions in the video, even liking and subscribing hahaha
Very enlightening! What if i have an NVR and connected it the IOT wifi, will it be able to notify me incase I turned on the Detect Motion and Notify me. Thanks and More Power!
Hi, thanks for your comment - I personally like to do notifications over network boundaries with MQTT - for this I have Mosquitto running on my router which is accessible from all network segments
6:20 What do you mean by "you won’t have different networks in one zone" ?
Hi, that was more or less just an assumption. Looking at what 99% of the users are doing, they would presumably only have one subnet in the LAN zone. If you had for example 192.168.4.0/24 and 192.168.5.0/24 _both_ in the same zone and you would want to allow forwarding traffic from one zone to the other, then you would need to set forwarding to allowed. If not, set it to drop or reject. So it's more about network isolation _within_ one zone.
Marc - great content really enjoyed it. Just one observation in relation to the OpenWrt firewall gui screen and your comments around 6:30. Earlier in the video you explained nicely about the different tables and chains involved but your comment about ignoring the forward chain setting on the right hand side of the screen threw me at first. You are basically saying ignore it (in fact I could just set the forward action to reject) as it has no effect at all as you should actually control forwarding through the edit menu function and by how you configure the two drop down menus at the bottom of the screen i.e. "allow forward to destination zones" and "allow forward from source zones". Just thought I would check my understanding is correct? thanks again
Hi - many thanks for asking ! I had to look it up before I made the video ;-) the third setting on the right is actually forwarding WITHIN the zone, i.e. if you had multiple networks inside the LAN zone and would want to allow or deny forwarding between them. So it's INSIDE one given zone. The setting that we change in the vieo is the forwarding BETWEEN zones, i.e. from one zone to another ;-) Great question - many thanks for your feedback !!!!
Just to double check two things at 5:32 when you say that the output is set by default so the router may access all other zones, can you think of a scenario where you wouldn't wat that to happen?
Also at 5:40 you mention that everything is kept its in own zone, do you mean that everything its kept in its own network within the zone that the forward policy is applied to?
Want to make sure my understanding is correct, thanks again for the wonderful vids!
Hi Marc. First of all your videos are very helpful and I'm great full for you putting in the time in teaching. However, I'm having an issue that didn't work on my end (7:08 mark). I followed everything on the guest zone, then I tried on that zone with my laptop to see if it works but, it let me ssh. I must've missed a step. I watched the video over a bunch of times. And I can't seem to get out of this loop.
Hi Drew, are you saying that you _can_ ssh into the router's guest IP even though your expectation is that you can't ? Presumably then you are connecting to the router over the LAN and not the GUEST network ? Even connecting to another IP _on_ the router would NOT go through the forward chain but through the INPUT chain of the network that you are connecting from. So if you connect from LAN, then yes - you can ssh to the guest's IP address. ut you can't do that if you come FROM guest.
Yes, as Marc has said, simply put: your laptop needs to be connected ONLY on your Guest Network for this to work (well, not work for the SSH part heh)
if you're plugged in with ethernet, you need to make sure that port is a Guest only port and not a LAN port (via Switch>VLAN ID).
Hi - I'd like to add a comment that took me hours of frustration. The 'interface' names need to be created in lowercase - otherwise there will be no IP assigned even if it's setup properly. I didn't try all capital - but a mix of lower/upper case resulted in a connection to the guest network, but no internet/obtained IP.
One thing I can't get working, is connecting over wifi to the "IOT" wifi network. Was that not the intention based on these instructions? Basically, I wanted a separate "guest" network for IOT devices that can't see my LAN. I can connect to the "GUEST" network fine, but not the "IOT" one.
Hi there , At 01:07 in firewall rule WAN =Reject input = reject output= accept forward = reject . this rule means all incoming traffic to our network is blocked or reject but from inside of the network any one can access to the internet? am I right ??
Correct. the first setting (WAN => Reject) means that we do not forward from the WAN to any other zone. (Input=reject) means, that traffic from the WAN can't reach processes on the router. (Output=accept) means that processes running on the router can go to the WAN. (forward=reject) only means that we would not forward traffic from one segment in the WAN to another Segment in the WAN. Internet Access from the LAN is set in the line above, where we allow zone forwarding (LAN => WAN).
@@OneMarcFifty thankyou for your answer
Hi, thank you for sharing this info, question, is there a way for Block access using MAC Filtering , I just want to allow wireless connection for those devices with MAC address in my list. Regards !
Hi, you can do that on the "Security"tab of the Wireless. Another possibility would be to just not give them IP addresses over DHCP.
Thanks so much for being so clarified, Mr.!☺
I only have 2 radios, so I created my primary and Guest network as described in the video. I'd like an IOT network, so how can I create a second network on one of the radios?
You can create multiple networks on one radio just by clicking on "Add" next to the radio under Network-Wireless. I have 6 SSIDs running here per radio.
Great openwrt videos,same case in my home,i want to trunk two openwrt routers with diferent vlans,thanks!!
Many thanks for your feedback!
Thank you so much for the effort you put to create this video.
Many thanks ;-)
The best video for openwrt. Thanks you so so much for this.
Many thanks for your kind feedback ;-) th-cam.com/channels/G5Ph9Mm6UEQLJJ-kGIC2AQ.html
This channel is a treasure! Thanks you!
Nice explanation. I just flashed openwrt to my router. I have a raspberry Pi running multiple applications on docker connected via ethernet. They all have unique IP's on my LAN ( by creating a macvlan network). Is it possible to isolate one application (using one unique lan ip) so that it cannot access other LAN devices?
Hi Aditya, that scenario would require the implementation of VLANs on the host and then binding the docker containers to the separate VLANs (e.g. eth0.3 / eth0.4)
I had an IOT WiFI access point, with its own SSID and password but associated with LAN (so not network separation). I followed most of the setup here to use a separate zone: ping works but my Kasa switches are no longer acessible. This is because broadcast is used to retrieve the switches, but local broadcast does not reach the IOT (different address space).
I found the udp-broadcast-relay-redux package, which does exactly what I need. If I launch it by hand to forward LAN broadcat requests to the IOT zone, then everything works. I checked and found that this was installed as a service, with a UCI-style configuration in /etc/config. However, no matter how I configure it, it does not start any instance of udp-broadcast-relay-redux. No error shown in the log either. After looking at the init script, I found that I needed to fill the "Service" attribute of the IOT interface: now "uci get network.IOT.device" returns the proper value, but the service instance still does not start.
My contribution to call to action: a tutorial on how to make udp-broadcast-relay-redux work would be really nice.
PS: I followed the demonstrated setup, and it worked fine (beside the broadcast issue, which I should have anticipated), even while the "Bridge Interface" option was not visible in Lucy. I understand this option was only enabled for future setups, and I guess that this is no longer needed.
Many thanks for the thorough feedback and sharing your solution
@@OneMarcFifty I am sorry to report that I did undo the separate firewall zone, and hooked my IOT access point back to the LAN interface.
The main issue has been how to setup new devices without access to the Internet. A secondary issue are the difficulties with configuring or using udp-broadcast-relay-redux.
I could have setup temporary firewall rules to allow Internet access while installing new devices, but that represents an additional headache.
Call to action: a video to explain the best approaches for installing new home automation devices on an IOT network without Internet access. 🙂
Well explained and sumarized the firewall concept of openwrt, not available in utube though it is in openwrt forum scattered in bits and pieces. Looking for videos on :
1. parent contro traffic rules, esp this pandemic season it all the more imperative. Kids are smart with their whack a mole device outwits the tagged IP or MAC in traffic rules.
2. Access openwrt router from internet (we have one of the wifi tagged to OpenVPN). No videos on this in you tube.
Hope there would be enough requests for these and would be helpful to mmany openwrt users. Thanks in advance.
Many thanks for your feedback @Ranish and thank you for the suggestions - port forwarding is on my list but parental control was not - I‘ll have a look into options (hint: give your kids a separate Wifi in a separate FW zone, this is resistant against ip/mac changes)
Is there to still block devices on the iot firewall from the internet, but also certain ones. For example a smart TV, Google home, or HA server
You could add another zone and call it "Multimedia" or the like
Thank you for this tutorial good Sir! This is verify helpful to me. Just want to add 1 question Sir. Is there a way to separate browsing (wanA) and gaming (wanB) on different wan interfaces with a failover option?
Yes you can do that. Just define two lan interfaces, attach a wifi to each one and define the same or different firewall rules for each (basically allow forward to wan)
If you isolate devices on IOT network from the internet, how do you control them from an app on your mobile device? Case in point: I have IP cams I would like to 1) isolate from my LAN 2) stop from "phoning home" and 3) still control/receive notifications from when at and away from home LAN
Hi - the main reason for me isolating my IOT devices is that I didn't have any cloud based IOT devices at the time of making the video (All my IOT devices where more or less DIY solutions based on ESP8266 / ESP32 at the time). I do in the meantime have some cloud devices, but I moved them again to a separate VLAN - All you'd have to do in order to adapt is add internet access to the IOT zone really.
@@OneMarcFiftyOk makes sense. Well done on all the OpenWrt videos. Very thorough and explained succinctly.
Hi, great videos. One question though, why does your IoT network have access to the router interface/login page? I had a rogue IoT device previously attempting user/Pw combinations, I really want to avoid this. How would I block them from seeing my router?
You also said you don't want devices on your IoT network to phone home. How would they continue to work if blocked from WAN? E.g blink cameras, nest doorbells etc as they need Internet?
Hi Will, mainly this was just for the sake of simplification. You could as well set the default Input to "drop" and then enable only needed services (such as DNS, DHCP, maybe NTP). W/r to internet access - the IOT devices that I use are no cloud devices. They are mainly DIY devices built with ESP8266 or ESP32 micro controllers and don't need internet access. My vacuum cleaner is an exception. It does need internet access and is in a separate DMZ.
Hey, Marc!
isn't it time to redo this episode with the latest OpenWRT version? Consider this a humble request...
Maybe just a quicky...
Hi, many thanks for the suggestion - following your comment I have re-watched the video - it's true that some things have changed in OpenWrt 21 - especially with bridging and how we assign the Wi-fi etc.... Need to think this over ;-)
@@OneMarcFifty I'll become a patreon if you do...
10:38 Is "Bridge Interfaces" option moved ?
Hi - yes, in OpenWrt from 21 on up you define a bridge under the devices tab and would then use that bridge as a device on the interface.
@@OneMarcFifty I setup the Guest Network ignoring bridge and it still works. Should I care about bridge ?
@@user-il6dq7kh5k If you only have the wi-fi on this interface and nothing else, then you don't need a bridge. A bridge is only needed if multiple devices should be on the same network interface (e.g. an Ethernet port and Wifi)
@@OneMarcFifty Why did you Bridge Guest Network ?
@@user-il6dq7kh5k Just a habit I guess - usually you wouldn't need Ethernet ports on Guest. But if I have the bridge, then I can just do it without too many changes.
Thanks for the great content. I followed the procedure and put iot devices as well as my printer into a different subnet. Now my computer can't find the printer. Could you please tell me how to make my printer accessible by my computer and mobile phones?
You'd need an mdns repeater/IGMP proxy style of software in order to use Airprint and the like so that your phone sees the printer. Omcproxy might do the trick or else mdns-repeater in a linux container or Avahi with echo function. Plus you need to allow ports 9100, 631, 443 TCP and 5353 UDP to the printer
Really well organized and informative! Thanks so much!
Just wanted to clarify around the 8:52 mark: If I want to separate these rules, wouldn’t DNS be using UDP and DHCP using TCP? I think you might have flipped them.
I am actually simplifying the rule in order to just use one. I open both protocols tcp and udp on both ports. But because there is nothing else on the opposite protocol there should be no risk to that.
@@OneMarcFifty According Wikipedia, looks only need open port 67 for DHCP cause port 68 only use to reply to client, so it not necessary. zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8A%A8%E6%80%81%E4%B8%BB%E6%9C%BA%E8%AE%BE%E7%BD%AE%E5%8D%8F%E8%AE%AE
@@OneMarcFifty You said that DNS uses only TCP. False! DNS uses UDP unless answer is too big to be delivered over UDP, in which case server tells client to connect again using TCP.
After many hours of struggling with OpenWRT in the past months, finally came back to it and re-watched your series on OpenWRT, I think I have a handle on it now (which probably means I don't understand it 🙂 ), and now have Guest Access points and its all working well..... its a steep learning curve with Openwrt, didn't get the fundamental building blocks of "interfaces" and how they relate to the router, to physicall ports and other network dark arts, but its now making much more sense. Many thanks Marc....
Hi Tony, glad to hear that the videos helped bringing pieces together. It's true that every software has their own look and feel and also - I'd say "philosophy" of looking at things. the main thing I personally struggle with products that are new to me seems to be exactly what you describe - getting my head around the "way of thinking" - or building blocks like you called it. Don't give up ;-)
Thank you for the great content! I would like to know a bit more, how do you configure the provider's router LAN output and the first OpenWRT WAN input area? Do you allow the provider's router to make the NAT? Or will it be done also in the OperWRT?
In my case, I just set the WAN interface of OpenWrt to DHCP, i.e. I let the ISP do NAT. From a performance standpoint not the best solution but the easiest to implement as from the ISP router's standpoint it looks like there is just one client.
Thank you for this superb video. I finally could understand the firewall in OpenWRT easily!. Subscribed and waiting for more OpenWRT master classes 😉
Awesome, thank you!
Great video, i'm often refering to it whenever my memory fail me :) I do have a question: On my iot zone, how would you enable smtp only to go through wan so my wireless cameras can send me emails on events. Your instructions on iot zone restrict access globally under zone forwarding proving no wan access. Would you go the by the trafics rules instead to permit only smtp protocol. Thank again for your great tutorial.
Thank you for the video! I have set up a guest wifi on my Openwrt 19.07 router. Everything works as it should, and the guest clients connected to the guest SSID cannot ping LuCi or any other IPs in the LAN zone. BUT I want the guests to be able to communicate with one IP in the LAN zone, a brother network printer. I checked what common ports are used for network printers and I have set up a traffic rule allowing use use of those ports only to the IP of the printer in the LAN zone. But I cannot access it from the guest clients.
Only if I allow "Forward to destination zone LAN" in the firewall zone settings in the guest zone, the devices in the guest zone is allowed to reach the printer, but then they can access the rest of the IPs in the LAN zone as well. How can I make the traffic rule somehow override the Firewall zone settings?
Create a traffic rule (Network - Firewall - Traffic rules). Set the protocol to TCP. Source Zone to GUEST, do NOT add a source IP. Set the destination Zone to LAN, specify the IP of your printer in the "Destination address" drop down. Specify the destination ports (e.g. "9100 631 515 443") and set the Action to "accept". Make sure that the rule is ABOVE any other deny rule (i.e. move it to the top of the list).
Hey Mac, question you might be able to answer - I have my access point set to AC mode on 5Ghz, but my devices don't seem to connect on that mode. I have one device with an AX WiFi chip which connects via 802.11a band and a device with an AC WiFi chip which connects on 802.11n. How can I make them connect on AC, and how can I confirm my access point is correctly broadcasting AC?
Hi - in order to check what the access points are broadcasting I suggest running "iw scan" on a Linux workstation with Wifi hardware. That will show you everything.
Great video helped out a lot as openwrt does things differently than other custom firmwares. One thing though my tv won’t connect to the IOT wifi I created is it due to way the forwarding because the tv needs an wan connection? Or am I understanding this wrong.
It might need a default gateway- or maybe it’s checking internet access? Dificult to say from a distance
question, would you class android streaming boxes and Chromecast googletv as IOTZone worthy and what about making casting work in this type of configuration?
Hi, I have added my Multimedia devices (Kodi, bluray player, TV Sets and the like) into a separate Multimedia Zone. Getting mDNS and broadcasts to work requires a lot of fine tuning and configuration... not easy ;-(
Can you possibly cover how to set that up please?
Thank you very much 😊
Great explanation
Thank you
if I set up the IOT as described here, my IOT devices become useless as far as I understand. If I use Home Assistant or any other IOT server located in the home network, according to my understanding, the devices are now isolated in such a way that they cannot transmit information to the HA. How do you solve this problem?
Hi, it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want your devices to be discoverable by HA then HA needs to have a leg in that network segment. You could therefore assign an additional network interface to the HA Server and modify routes/forwarding etc. or you could define routes on the router allowing HA access into that segment. Alternatively (this is my use case with FHEM, but would work with any Home Automation that supports MQTT) - install Mosquitto on the router and have the IOT devices communicate with HA over MQTT. Mosquitto would listen and broadcast in all segments and hence be an application gateway or middleware for all home automation over all network segments without exposing devices or http interfaces and the like.
So good. Thank you for clear explanation!
Many thanks Anatoli.
I would really like to know how to allow ipv6 on the guest network, I've been trying but with no succes as of right now.
Hi Eduardo, does your ISP allow Prefix delegation or do you only have one IPV6 address ?
@@OneMarcFifty it does allow, and it works on my lan interface, but i cant get it to work on guest vlan
i want to open the iot network for mqtt at port 1883 for the lan network, so that my iot devices can send packages to a mqtt broker which is in lan. I dont know how to handle it.
Marc, great video, convinced me to move to OpenWRT with all my thought to restrict the local devices I have as much as possible. One question though - why not restricting IoT devices to access my router? I'm not an expert, but doesn't those smart plugs represent a trojan horse for someone who knows what to do with them once they can ssh to my router? What if we "reject their input" and create the same rules as for Guest Network with DHCP rule only?
Hi Vadim, valid approach. There is no 100% Security ;-) If someone takes over your router then you might have a whole bunch of other problems as well ;-)
Hi Marc, thanks for the video, it really helped me a lot! I have one question about my specific setup. I have one device which needs to be able to talk to all iot devices, the iot devices need to be able to talk to that one device and this but only this one device needs to be able to access the wan zone. Right now I located that one device in the iot zone but don't know how to setup a rule so that this one device can access the wan. Can you help me with this one? Thank you!
Go to Network-Firewall-Traffic rules, add a new rule. Name "IOT exception", protocol : TCP/UDP or whatever you need, Source Zone: IOT, Source Address: Select the device that should be able to talk to the internet. Destination Zone: WAN, Action: accept. Mae sure that rule is at the top of the list or at least before any deny rule, save and apply ;-)
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for the quick reply. What I was missing was that I just allowed TCP/UDP and I was testing my connection via a ping 🤦♂️
@@Raukze Perhaps you had to indicate the protocol as "Any".
Hi Mark!
In openwrt version 22.0.3, when creating a network interface, you need to select a device. Apparently for the guest and IOT you need to create a new device?
Either you create a device for each VLAN (eth0.44 or the like), add it to a new bridge or you can use Distributed Switch architecture DSA. There is a video about VLANs on version 21 on my channel page
This is am outstanding video. I hope your channel is successful. You deserve it. I am subscribing.
Hey Brian, many thanks for your kind feedback and for subscribing!
First of all, I would like to thank you. And I would like to ad just one small thing. I forgot the rule for the IOT-DHCP part in the firewall configuration section. Without it the IOT devices will never get the IP addresses 😀
Hi there , i have a question , can we have different define of the input and output , input =Lan and output= Wan ? thnx
Hi Martin, "input" is stuff going to processes on the router. "Output" is stuff coming from a process on the router. LAN/WAN etc. just defines the zone where the packets go to or come from. So each zone has their own input/output rule really.
@@OneMarcFifty thank you for the quick response to my question, so my definition was wrong.
Hi thanks for the tutorial. Very well done.
I have a question: since I follow the tutoria and created the 2interfaces for IOT and guest, all my physical ports seems to fall under the IOT DHCP server.
What am I doing wrong?
Hi Cattivello, difficult to say from a distance - are you using OpenWrt 19 or 21 ? in 21, the configuration of the VLANs is different.
@@OneMarcFifty 21 (yes, i noticed some differences) for the rest it all works. But at the moment i have to create static leases to make sure my devices stay in the correct subnet
@@cattivello You may be allowed to forward between firewall zones.
Marc, I have a use case where a guest on the Guest lan needs access to a printer on the LAN lan. I've tried adding a firewall traffic rule to allow access to the printer ip address from the Guest lan. This doesn't work as it appears the general lan to guestZone forwarding rule is executed first and blocks all traffic from the Guest lan to the LAN lan. How do you handle forwarding exceptions to the general zone forwarding rules?
The general setting should not be evaluated before a traffic rule. However, if there is a traffic rule above then this goes first
@@OneMarcFifty You were spot on, there was another conflicting traffic rule.
This is so good. Thank you very much for sharing.
Hi Josh, thank you very much !
@@OneMarcFifty it’s silly but after a 15 year career at big tech companies in Silicon Valley, this is the video which made iptables finally click in my head! Would love to see a deeper dive, I feel like you have a lot to share.
Please visit my channel page: th-cam.com/users/onemarcfifty
Want to talk to me? Join my Discord Server: discord.com/invite/DXnfBUG
Great channel, Great instruction too but for the life of me just could not get this tutorial to work on a Linksys EA3500 running OpenWRT 21.02.3. That said, OpenWRT's Guest WiFi Basics CLI command list also would not work which may mean the issue is with the router (or the seat to kybd interface).
Hi Greg, some things have changed in OpenWrt 21 (what you have) as opposed to 19 (the video). Mainly bridging is done on the device tab under network-interfaces and you would then select the bridge as a device under your interface. Your Wi-fi is then added to that network.
Can you install some Linux Containers or some virtualized machines with OpenWrt - e.g. by configuration of the different network settings for the Linux Containers such as Host, Bridge, MacVLAN, IPVLAN, Isolated, Custom etc. with OpenWrt?
You can run Docker and/or Qemu on OpenWrt- if you use x86 hardware. I wouldn’t use Macvlan or the like though for security reasons
@@OneMarcFifty How can I run Docker and/or Qemu or Linux Containers like Promox Containers on OpenWrt, if you use x86 or x86-64 hardware? If macVLAN is bad, because it can cause problems for securit reasons, how should I solve this problem?
Actually, it's not so much the MacVLAN network that would be bad, but rather you would need to make sure that you don't bind anything to the WAN adapter inadvertently. As long as you bind to the LAN you should be fine.
@@OneMarcFifty Is Cloudflare with its own idea of Zero Trust Tunnel a good idea for this issue?
is the defalt firewall settings good sucurity?
Thanks for the explanation, it was very clear. I have been fooled by that double "forward" setting! If I can ask, what hardware did you use to install OpenWRT on?
Yeah, that one is hard to explain because the terms are so similar. Honestly I can’t remember which hardware I used for the video - one of Archer C7, D-Link dir2660 or potentially a VM.
Hello! How to pass VLANs via WDS?
Hi Franco, you would need to use GRETAP devices or the like and bridge them to your VLANs on both sides.
@@OneMarcFifty I was able to do it!
Running 22.03, and setting up a zone to reject input, let's say from a guest network, is yielding all devices on the interface, in that zone, with the inability to get a IP from the DHCP server. In order for the devices to connect to the internet, they need to be configured on the device end to have a static IP within the range... I think openWRT in a update changed the way these firewall zone rules work?
Hello, excellent your lessons! :)
any lesson to configure "Nat 1:1 in openwrt " or netmap - Dnetmap "??
Hi JB, many thanks ;-) I'll need to have a look at NAT networks and possible videos on that - comes up quite often. But none for the time being I'm afraid ;-( th-cam.com/channels/G5Ph9Mm6UEQLJJ-kGIC2AQ.html
Awesome content! Thank you… I see many new projects in my future. New sub!!! 👍🏾❤️
Awesome - many thanks for watching and subscribing !
Would you mind sharing what router models you use/suggest for the Router/Firewall and Access Point Devices? Thanks for these videos, I've been struggling in vain to do a similar setup using dd-wrt.
Hi Andrew, in the video I had been using Archer C7's but I have replaced them with D-Link DIR-2660's these days. You might want to check my video on Router models here: th-cam.com/video/wP1ZcQBLL1k/w-d-xo.html
Marc, do I need to add a new interface for each Vlan ID I want my router to recognize or is adding it on the "Switch" page enough?
And also do i add firewall zone settings for each? I may be thinking too complicated for this and it's much simpler than I thought
It depends on the OpenWrt version. I briefly touch on this in the "VLANs in OpenWrt 21" video.
Any recommendations for a WiFi card that will work with openWRT? What kind of cards do you have?
The Qualcomm Atheros QCA9880 work quite well. The Mediatek seem to be good as well.
Hi! Actions ACCEPT, REJECT ... etc. are used when we talk about rules in the chain (with appropriate criteria for a packet in these rules) but not to the chain itself. How it can be understood? Does it mean that chosen action is applied for all rules in the chain? Thank you!
Hi Aleksandr, those rules are default settings, i.e. they apply for everything. If you want then you can have exceptions in the traffic rules and be more specific on Source IP, Destination IP and many more.
Hey there. I know that this video is 3 years old. But I'm trying to add another IOT zone for things like smart tv that still needs to connect to internet. From my understanding from your video, I needed to create an IOT zone but with almost the same settings with guest. The problem I am having is I cannot cast from my main SSID to the SSID of the IOT with the internet.
Would love to learn how to enable IPv6 on my Guest and IOT zones.
Hi Rafael, I will do IPv6 episodes this year.
@@OneMarcFifty I would also love to understand IPv6 in OpenWrt. It is very necessary today.