LACP Issue..... Please help

[Irvin Daniel]

Hi all need some help with LACP:

so after hours of configuring I finally got my switch to work (CISCO 3750X).


Flags: D - down P - in port-channel
I - stand-alone s - suspended
H - Hot-standby (LACP only)
R - Layer3 S - Layer2
U - in use f - failed to allocate aggregator
u - unsuitable for bundling
w - waiting to be aggregated
d - default port

Number of channel-groups in use: 6
Number of aggregators: 6

Group Port-channel Protocol Ports
------+-------------+-----------+-----------------------------------------------
1 Po1(SU) LACP Gi1/0/4(P) Gi1/0/5(P) Gi1/0/6(P)
Gi1/0/14(P)
2 Po2(SD) -
3 Po3(SD) -
4 Po4(SD) -
5 Po5(SD) -
44 Po44(SD) -

Trinny-Networks#
Then I go into my nas an set up LACP manually then I see on the switch the ports go down then up. all lights are green. But I can not access my WEBGui from the Static IP address I set. the only way for me to access the nas is by setting up a crossover directly to one of my computers. Can someone point me in the right direction... On how to set up LACP
I am using Static can't use DHCP.....

 

[cyberjock]

Have you checked out the FreeNAS manual for LACP? Aside from that you are kind of on your own as your network switch has to be setup appropriately.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

Yeah I followed the steps from the manual. I configure the switch accordingly. The switch sees the ports but I cannot ping the NAS..... I even set up a crossover connection and reconfigured the LACP thru the webgui and still no luck

 

[eraser]

Can you post the output of the following commands run on your switch?

show run int port-channel1
show run int g1/0/4
show run int g1/0/5
show run int g1/0/6
show run int g1/0/14

 

[eraser]

Found this today which shows the necessary steps on both the Cisco and FreeNAS side of things. Reminder to reboot the FreeNAS box after creating the LAgg.

http://samkear.com/freenas/configuring-link-aggregation-freenas-8-lacp-cisco-etherchannel

 

[Irvin Daniel]

hello there here goes. After doing this I do see some difference in port config's going to try and correct and post back in a few? Thanks for the help in advance would of never taught to check individual ports.....

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/13
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode access
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/14
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate
duplex full
flowcontrol receive on
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
spanning-tree bpdufilter enable
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/15
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode trunk
channel-group 2 mode active
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/16
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode trunk
channel-group 2 mode active

end

 

[eraser]

Cool.. first thing I notice is that three of your interfaces are set up as trunk ports, and one is an access port. They should all have the same configuration.

Since you are only allowing a single vlan over a trunk, so it would be less complicated to just configure each port as an access port (That way you do not have to worry about configuring VLANs on the FreeNAS side).

Don't forget to disable spanning tree on each port (by running "spanning-tree portfast"), or else you will have to wait 60 seconds for the link to start passing traffic...

 

[Irvin Daniel]

Hi the @eraser I reconfigured my ports to all be the same and all ports are up now. My speed is about 60-80mb/s which is not bad. I may be able to increase it but have to change my CPU since it is only 333MHz and get something in the GHz department. I currently have 16gb ECC Memory planning to also update to 32GB (board max). Do you have any suggestion on better perfecting my LACP connection (I plan to move it up to 8)? And any suggestion on increasing speed since I am using CIFS? Also Can I use NFS? Clients are 2 Win 7, 1 XP, 1 Win 8 and plan to add a Server (have not pick the OS yet still trying to learn about them).

any help will be appreciated. Port configs are as follow:

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/13
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode access
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/14
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode access
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/15
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode access
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
end

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/16
description NAS Lagg
switchport access vlan 10
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 10
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10
switchport mode access
channel-group 2 mode active
spanning-tree portfast

end

Thanks again for the help....

 

[Irvin Daniel]

Cool.. first thing I notice is that three of your interfaces are set up as trunk ports, and one is an access port. They should all have the same configuration.

Since you are only allowing a single vlan over a trunk, so it would be less complicated to just configure each port as an access port (That way you do not have to worry about configuring VLANs on the FreeNAS side).

Don't forget to disable spanning tree on each port (by running "spanning-tree portfast"), or else you will have to wait 60 seconds for the link to start passing traffic...

So I should run the ports in trunk mode not access?

and disable spanning-tree port fast?

 

[eraser]

So I should run the ports in trunk mode not access?

and disable spanning-tree port fast?

No you are good now! Your post from a few minutes ago already has everything I suggested. You already have "switchport mode access" and you already have "spanning-tree portfast".

 

[Irvin Daniel]

No you are good now! Your post from a few minutes ago already has everything I suggested. You already have "switchport mode access" and you already have "spanning-tree portfast".

Oh ok thank you for the help and taking the time.. any other suggestions from the previous post..

 

[eraser]

Hi the @eraser I reconfigured my ports to all be the same and all ports are up now. <...> . Do you have any suggestion on better perfecting my LACP connection (I plan to move it up to 8)? <....>

Well now that you have a LAgg group ("EtherChannel" in Cisco-speak) set up and working, I will tell you why it won't really help in a home environment :). A single TCP session between a computer and your FreeNAS server will always* go over the same ethernet link in a LAgg group. This is by design as it keeps all frames/packets in-order. This is good as TCP doesn't like it when too many packets arrive out of order.

So why even use a LAgg group? If you were a company with dozens of clients accessing your FreeNAS box, the load-balancing feature of the LACP protocol will distribute connections from different clients over all four of your links, giving you more bandwidth overall, but each single client would still be limited to 1 Gb max (or whatever your link speed is).

It is still cool to practice with LAgg groups at home though.. :)

*in general.

 

[eraser]

<...> My speed is about 60-80mb/s which is not bad...And any suggestion on increasing speed since I am using CIFS?

Also Can I use NFS? Clients are 2 Win 7, 1 XP, 1 Win 8 and plan to add a Server (have not pick the OS yet still trying to learn about them).

Capitalization is important when talking about network speeds. Your speeds are most likely in MB (MegaBytes), not mb (Megabits).

A single gigabit link has a theoretical max of around 125 MB/sec, so hitting 60-80 MB/sec is very good over CIFS. I get around 60 MB/sec over CIFS myself when copying several hundred MB of data. I did spend some time playing around with NFS clients for Windows, but in the end I went back to using CIFS. Simple and easy. Another bonus of using CIFS is that once you set up periodic snapshots of your volumes then you can use the "Previous Versions" tab in Windows Explorer to easily recover old versions of files.


If you have some Linux systems around then NFS would be great to set up as that is the file sharing protocol of choice! I also use a NFS share for my VMware ESXi server datastore.

You can also play around with sharing chunks of disk space over iSCSI. That is a great learning experience too.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

Capitalization is important when talking about network speeds. Your speeds are most likely in MB (MegaBytes), not mb (Megabits).

A single gigabit link has a theoretical max of around 125 MB/sec, so hitting 60-80 MB/sec is very good over CIFS. I get around 60 MB/sec over CIFS myself when copying several hundred MB of data. I did spend some time playing around with NFS clients for Windows, but in the end I went back to using CIFS. Simple and easy. Another bonus of using CIFS is that once you set up periodic snapshots of your volumes then you can use the "Previous Versions" tab in Windows Explorer to easily recover old versions of files.


If you have some Linux systems around then NFS would be great to set up as that is the file sharing protocol of choice! I also use a NFS share for my VMware ESXi server datastore.

You can also play around with sharing chunks of disk space over iSCSI. That is a great learning experience too.

oh okay.. Thank you for the info I am learning all this now so its good for the help. So i am going to stick with CIFS for now. I may also add 4 more ports to the LACP connection. I plan to run 2 HTPC (XMBC), and 2 computers for now. Maybe a server later on.

 

[pirateghost]

oh okay.. Thank you for the info I am learning all this now so its good for the help. So i am going to stick with CIFS for now. I may also add 4 more ports to the LACP connection. I plan to run 2 HTPC (XMBC), and 2 computers for now. Maybe a server later on.

If thats all you plan on running, you are wasting ports.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

If thats all you plan on running, you are wasting ports.

Oh okay Have a 48 port switch well 52 if counting sfp ports. not really much to add right now until I learn some more stuff. Is 4 ports good enough for now?

 

[titan_rw]

Oh okay Have a 48 port switch well 52 if counting sfp ports. not really much to add right now until I learn some more stuff. Is 4 ports good enough for now?

One port would be good enough for now.

With only 5 clients, you're not really going to get any benefit from lacp. If you have 50, or 500, then I'd look at it.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

One port would be good enough for now.

With only 5 clients, you're not really going to get any benefit from lacp. If you have 50, or 500, then I'd look at it.

Even if I have 2 htpc for streaming......

 

[pirateghost]

Even if I have 2 htpc for streaming......

Even if you had 10 HTPCs

Sent from my Nexus 7

 

[eraser]

Even if I have 2 htpc for streaming......

According to the following link, a HD video stream encoded using H.264 uses a maximum of 4000 Kbps (4 Mbps).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj688118.aspx