Setting up Truenas as a Switch

[ouelletn]

Hello,

In truenas free, I was able to set up a secondary network card as a 2.5 GBE switch for a few office PCs using this guide.


Basically, truenas takes in one network connection from a router and acts as a switch to multiple PC's connected through a second card.

In scale, the bridge connection feature appears to not work in the same way, or disconnects the PCs randomly after a time.

Is there any way to do this in scale?


Thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

Why? There is absolutely nothing to gain from this, there's a reason switch chips exist.

That said...

In scale, the bridge connection feature appears to not work in the same way, or disconnects the PCs randomly after a time.

Realtek NICs?

 

[ouelletn]

Why? There is absolutely nothing to gain from this, there's a reason switch chips exist.

That said...

Realtek NICs?

Generally, it is to allow a 10GbE link between trueNas and a computer without buying a switch.

It worked fine under core in the past with 2.5 GbE Realtek chips when following this guide but the same approach does not work after upgrading to scale.


One is an Aquantia AQC107 and the other is an intel nic.

 

[Ericloewe]

Generally, it is to allow a 10GbE link between trueNas and a computer without buying a switch.

That's not what you asked about. A direct link on a different subnet is all you need for that scenario and works as fine as anything.
Trying to do switching in software is not a productive use of resources (hardware, energy, etc.), unless it's for VMs/containers/etc on a single host in some scenarios.

It worked fine under core in the past with 2.5 GbE Realtek chips when following this guide but the same approach does not work after upgrading to scale.


One is an Aquantia AQC107 and the other is an intel nic.

Are you using the same hardware that worked with Core? I'm a bit confused by these two sentences. I ask because what you describe sounds a lot more like "the NIC is crapping out" than "the networking stack is misconfigured". And your scenario is fairly conducive to that sort of issue:

• Realtek's 2.5GbE stuff is just about as terrible as the 1GbE crap, without the benefit of a mature driver (for whatever that's worth in Realtekland)
• Aquantia is theoretically a cut above Realtek, but driver support is somehow even worse.
• Intel had a bit of a stinker with early 2.5GbE units, later sorted in a new hardware revision. But the driver is still rather immature as well.