SirEDCaLot

Hmm Are you wedded to that particular Mac address? If not, shut down the VM, delete the virtual Network card, then make a new virtual Network card. Copy paste the Mac of that new card into pfsense with the static mapping, and fire up the VM. See what happens.

If that doesn’t work, I remember something it was possible for proxmox to do some kind of routed Network system. To investigate that, delete all static mappings, fire up the VM, and just look at what Mac address it shows getting the DHCP lease. Is it the one that shows as being assigned to the VM?

Yeah this still sounds very much like what I had happen. pfSense tries really hard to hang on to that old random dhcp lease sometimes.

Don’t worry about ARP- that just shows what currently exists.

You might try turn off the vm, delete the static mapping, then delete the DHCP lease in status - dhcp leases, then add the static mapping again and turn the vm back on.

Also on pfSense check /var/dhcpd/var/db/dhcpd.leases . Chances are your VM is in there. Turn off VM, stop DHCP service on pfSense, delete lease from that file, restart DHCP service, check static mapping, turn on VM.
Let me know if that works…

I think you have a PFsense problem not a proxmox problem.

I have encountered something similar to this in the past with PF sense. What fixed it for me is shut down the machine in question, let the DHCP lease show offline in PF sense, then use that very line on the status - DHCP leases page to assign the static IP address to it. Then when I booted it back up it worked.

Also copy and paste the MAC address right out of the DHCP leases table if you are adding it manually. I believe it may be case sensitive.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.