Hi everyone
I need some computer networking expert who can help me figure out the why and how of an oddity with Vmware workstation and Wireshark.
I set a dual WAN failover on my OPNsense machine running as a VM in VMware workstation.
I set WAN1 interface in bridge mode, so that it gets an IP (192.168.3.19) from my physical router (a Mikrotik device)in my LAN, same subnet (192.168.3.0/24) of my pc desktop which runs VMware Workstation.
I set WAN2 in NAT mode (VMnet8 adapter) and it gets 192.168.211.148 as IP (subnet 192.168.211.0/24)
Failover works like a charm. It switches flawlessly between the two WANs if one goes down.
Ok, I am happy with that.
I also set a port forward rule on WAN1 in order to allow access to a website running on a client
in OPNsense’s LAN (192.168.70.101) port 80. So, if I run http://192.168.3.19/joomlademo/index.php/en/ I can see the website’s homepage. GOOD!
However, I have a problem with getting access to it from WAN2.
of course, I set the same NAT rule for WAN2, and I thought that I could get access through WAN2 by simply typing
http://192.168.211.148/joomlademo/index.php/en/ from my PC (192.168.3.100).
I then realized that I can’t even ping WAN2 (even though I set a pass rule as I did for WAN1).
I was wondering if there might be some routing issue. I mean my pc doesn’t know how to reach 192.168.211.0/24 (VMware VMnet adapter).
Anyway, after a few attempts,I run Wireshark to analyze traffic going through VMnet8 adapter and unexpectedly I noticed that I could get access to the webserver via 192.168.211.148 (from my physical pc desktop) while Wireshark was running, BUT if I stopped it I couldn’t get access to the webserver via 192.168.211.148 anymore. Very strange.
For the record, no problem whatsoever getting access to the same web server via 192.168.3.19 in either case.
Could someone help me figure this out please?
Thanks