I probably am making it more complicated than necessary. I’m pretty green to the network side of this and admittedly over concerned about IoT devices tunneling out and becoming spyware.
That being said, I like this approach. I have WAN & LAN, I’ll probably just add DMZ and IoT. I may add another physical layer between the pfSense IoT NIC and the IoT switch. It probably doesn’t add any security, but it should relieve some if the routing load from my current pfSense box. And it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I tried that. Nothing plugged in except the PSU and front headers, mobo sitting on a stack of paper, no response at all when I hit the switch. I’m working on returning now 😞