Telus → Re: [ALL] Telus IGMP settings 2016 pfsense

I recently switched from the Telus router to pfSense on my GPON connection, so this was something I needed to figure out too. I've spent a couple of hours on it today and have come up with some settings that are working well for me.

The settings mentioned at the beginning of the thread are still basically correct, but there are a number of other things I had to do to get things to work properly. I'm using a clean install of the latest stable version of pfSense, 2.3.2 -- these settings may not work on earlier versions. More specifically, from reading the pfSense issue tracker, I understand that igmpproxy was updated from a 2005 version to a much more recent version in the 2.3 stream, so I imagine there are a lot of bugfixes that aren't in the 2.2 releases of pfSense.

I have also not yet enabled IPv6 on my pfSense router yet. I doubt this will cause any problems, as my understanding is that the IPTV services are entirely IPv4 based even if IPv6 is available, but for completeness this needs to be mentioned. Once I'm happy this is stable for a couple of weeks I'll probably tackle IPv6.

Here is what I believe are the required settings, although I haven't done a factory reset and tried applying these alone, so I may have missed something. There's also a good chance that some settings may not be required -- it's quite tedious to try and ensure you have the minimum settings. Where possible I've added a brief description as to why I think the setting may be necessary, and I've included screenshots in case there are settings that I forgot I've changed, or settings that have new defaults which may not have been updated if you've upgraded pfSense from an earlier version.

Interfaces/LAN
The setting I've changed here is to uncheck 'Block bogon networks'. Bogon networks are IP addresses which are reserved but not allocated to anyone. However, the bogon list includes the 224.0.0.0/4 range, which is used for multicast.

Note that it's almost certainly possible to leave this setting enabled, and use a more restrictive firewall policy to just allow the multicast range. However, when I briefly tried this, I was unable to get my custom rule to appear above the bogon rule in the pfSense firewall, so it would not be reached. For the moment, I've gone with the easy approach.