NEWB Question about FreePBX 60/eth ports

Just brought up my first FreePBX machine, a FreePBX 60 appliance. I mistakenly thought that the three ports on the appliance were switch ports, but they appear to be separate interfaces. I noticed that eth0 is the only port that works out of the box. eth0 and my three phones are currently connected to a small switch and that switch is connected to my firewall. I’d like to move eth0 to my firewall and move the switch (with phones) to eth1. I’d like to keep all of the devices (pbx/phones) in the same subnet. What would the process look like to accomplish this?

You would need to configure the Ethernet ports in Admin-Sys Admin- Network Setting

Since you are setting up your first PBX unless you have experience in Linux and routing a multi homed server will no doubt give you headaches

Best to setup the PBX with one Ethernet port for now

The week has some limited resources on how to setup/manage networking settings on these units as well.

https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/System+Admin+-+Network+Settings

https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/PPS/How+to+set+Network+Settings+from+the+CLI

To be clear, I’m not looking to have a different network on each interface, but rather, both interfaces on the same network. I’m thinking I just need eth1 in DHCP relay mode to ensure my phones get the proper IP addresses. Or am I thinking about this all wrong?

These can’t be configured and are not meant to be used as a switch. You can configure them to be on the same network but then you have to assign each interface a different IP on said network, which I am not sure what the use case would be for that.

You can configure one interface to be the WAN interface that’s internet facing and one interface to be your phone LAN interface where all your phones would connected to this device.

You’ll need to connect a switch to your phone LAN interface if you need multiple phones to communicate to it.

Or

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/bonding

Bonding is not the same as how @theflatbranch wanted to use these. Bonding is usually used for link aggregation purposes and requires switching equipment that supports such operation. You wouldn’t be able to plug in different phones into a bonded interface and expect it to work properly.

I would have thought mode 3 a good candidate.

I can’t speak to it as I’ve never tried setting up a bonded interface to act as a switch but that seems to be still for an entirely different use case.

Up to the OP if he wants to go to the trouble of testing this and correcting any problems he may run into.

Also, I feel like that solution is FAR beyond a “NEWB” topic, especially when compared to getting a cheap switch to sit in front of a single network interface.

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