pppoe interface on pfsense - "invalid phyint address"

[tinythomasffm]

Hi,

I am trying to set up pimd on my pfsense box for Magenta TV streaming. My setup: DSL - modem - pfsense - several vlans

Out of the box, pimd starts but throws an error about the upstream (WAN) Interface: /var/etc/pimd/pimd.conf:6 - Invalid phyint address 'pppoe2'

I searched and didn't find any known issue on this - maybe I missed it, though. The interface (pppoe2) obviously exists and works fine - it used to work with igmproxy since a while ago, when DTAG changed something, this is why I try to migrate to IGMPv3..

Any idea? Is this an issue with pimd, FreeBSD or pfsense? I'm a little stuck here...

Regards Thomas

[troglobit]

I'm not sure what version of pimd they are using in pfSense, but it can be one of two things, I think. First, Iirc the pimd code base doesn't support point-to-point interfaces properly yet. There was some half-baked patche a few years a ago, but that's not been packaged by me into a proper release yet. Second, provided you run some unreleased pimd, it could potentially be a badly formatted warning message and the code bails out because the interface doesn't have the MULTICAST flag set.

I should probably set up some basic test case for PPP links, but that'll be in Linux and using network namespaces to emulate multiple devices. So possibly it won't cover all cases, or uncover the problems you see.

Fyi, switching from igmpproxy to pimd is quite a big switch and the two work nothing alike. The former basically just forwards a local IGMP join message from your LAN to another interface. Setting up a multicast kernel route back to your LAN for anything that comes in matching that joined group on the WAN. The latter requires multicast to already be there on the WAN interface, or that the upstream ISP's router also runs PIM so it can do a PIM Join for the requested (source and) group. In most use-cases, replacing igmpproxy with pimd won't work.