No instead of using DHCP forwarding they’ve just put the DHCP server (PFSense) into every VLAN, listening but handing out a different IP as the gateway. It seems pretty goofy to me, and since the same PFSense is also the upstream gateway of the L3 switch, I believe there is asymmetric routing going on for any client traffic that goes out of the network (upstream path is client > switch > pfsense > internet, downstream is internet > pfsense > client, since pfsense sees every subnet as directly connected). But that doesn’t affect the DHCP
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Gotcha and agree, there are cleaner ways to go about that. For example, we run central DHCP servers and use forwarding via helper addresses at the router subinterfaces or SVI’s. Pretty easy to manage that way.
how come his other VLANs work but VLAN250 does not?
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adelina is the notebook I use for testing.
The routing table depends on how did I configure the interfaces.
Right now, I’m using a static IP and default gateway on VLAN 250 and that is the only active route (and everything works fine).
However, if I disable the static IP and gateway and try to obtain those via DHCP, the routing table is empty.
As I explained above the notebook AND the pfSense running the DHCP server are connected to the same layer 2 VLAN (and all intermediate switches allow transit on that VLAN), so I don’t need to route DHCP packages.
Yeah, I know. However, pfSense is the DHCP server and it has worked with this model so far.
We’ll probably have a complete network reengineering soon so I don’t want to touch much until then,
This is what is driving me nuts.
I have similar route table, I use DHCP but my switch is after pfsense
ISP – cable modem – pfsense (.1) – switch – clients sam (.26)
user@sam:~$ ip route
default via 10.0.0.1 dev enp2s0 proto dhcp src 10.0.0.26 metric 100
10.0.0.0/24 dev enp2s0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.0.26 metric 100
Hi folks.
Thanx for all your help.
Today all users started complaining about internet not working and, as we all know, it was a DNS problem.
I restarted pfSense’s unbound resolver and everything went back to normal, and…
… the dreaded DHCP on my poor new VLAN started working 
So… add “restart pfSense DNS resolver” as a step when creating new VLAN with DHCP.
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Who would of guessed. I will keep that in my notes for any future problems..Thanks!!
This is known issue with pfsense that they refuse to fix. You can get the same result by going to System / General and just hit save and apply changes without changing any settings. It applies to many issues not just the one you described.
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