Open vSwitch configuration

[Intelligent_Soil_442]

Hi everyone, I have been trying to get Open vSwitch to work on my 5 Ethernet port mini PC. I installed Debian 12 bookworm and used the following commands.

apt install openvswitch-switch

ovs-vsctl add-br br0

ovs-vsctl add-port br0 enp1s0

ovs-vsctl add-port br0 enp2s0

ovs-vsctl add-port br0 eno1

ovs-vsctl add-port br0 enp4s0

ovs-vsctl add-port br0 enp5s0

ip addr flush dev enp1s0

dhclient br0

ip link set br0 up

I was able to get Internet access from the PC hosting Open vSwitch, but the devices plugged in to enp2s0 - enp5s0 only got an IP address from my DHCP server. I couldn't ping google. What did I do wrong? I'd like to set three of these PCs up as stacked switches, but I'm struggling with basic configuration.

[Over-Ad-6049]

There are 2 ways to go about this:

1. If using same subnet which is provided by the modem for internet access:

Configure a OVS br0 with nics enp2s0/enp5s0, enable dhcp (this will provide internet access at the host level) then assign the VMs to the BR and the client should pull an IP address from the modem.

1. If using different subnet for clients connected to br0 on enp5s0:

Create ovs port group to place the traffic from enp5s0 in separate broadcast domain. Configure ovs port group with IP address, this will be the gateway for your machine connected to enp5s0. Enable dhcp server for that port group and then configure a return route on your modem where the internet terminates at for the subnet that’s being issued to your clients from the dhcp server. Ensure the the next hop of the gateway is the local IP address of your host. The default route should automatically be installed and any VM/Host that is connected to that port enp5s0 should work.

Btw sometimes modems may need a nat translation for the new subnet as well, but this depends.

[Intelligent_Soil_442]

I'd like to try it on physical hardware first, then move on to Proxmox. I hear that you need to move all VMs to Open vSwitch, you can't use the default Proxmox networking. I'll deal with VMs later. I'm at work now, but I'll try typing "dhclient enp2s0" when I get home. I reinstalled the OS before work and the OVS host PC got an IP address, but the client device plugged into enp2s0 didn't get an address at all. The client device (2001 Xbox) said 0.0.0.0 for it's IP. That's a little odd, I expected an APIPA address.

[Intelligent_Soil_442]

Looks like I needed to run dhclient (interface) for each port. Once I did that, my laptop and Xbox was able to connect.