pfSense, UniFi, & VLANS: a tale of three toddlers

Hi all! After a long and troublesome battle against the gods of networking and the intricacies of pfSense, I have finally developed a process (that I understand, at least) for initialising an ETHX port to pass VLAN traffic that is tagged externally by a switching device (in my case, a USW-PRO 48PoE UniFi managed switch).

In the hope that this can be of use to others out there, I have written up my process for doing so below. But first, here is a contextual network diagram for my setup:

pfSense Updating Woes: Crisis Aversion

Here is a little guide from a nightmare I encountered whilst trying to perform a maintenance update on a pfSense router… I hope my pain and suffering can help someone else :’).

DO NOT MAKE MY MISTAKE - CREATE A BACKUP FOR YOUR PFSENSE SETTINGS AND STORE IT LOCALLY BEFORE UPDATING!!!!.

pfSense DOES create a backup of settings before updating, but accessing it can be problematic to say the least… (see below)