SOLVED networking idiot trying to set up quad Ethernet lagg group on FreeNAS

[High Voltage]

so, I'm not going to lie here, I'm a complete and utter idiot when it comes to networking, I can get windows running, I can get FreeNAS running, I can configure both systems, and I can even through tech support phone calls to dell and my firewall manufacturer (zyxel usg 50 on its own subnet) get the things configured and set up in working fashion, however when it comes to getting FreeNAS working with link aggregation, using dell powerconnect 5324's, I cannot seem to get FreeNAS to link aggregate the Tyan motherboard's built in quad Ethernet interface to work at all in any way when trying to link aggregate the quad Ethernet interfaces and I do not honestly know what the heck I am doing here....so, can someone please help me understand what I need to do?? because I see plenty of threads explaining this, but I'm going to be honest, I do not understand a lick of what I am reading in these other threads and cannot combobulate what they are saying to do or not do. I DO know that my dell powerconnects support lacp of some kind and that I can configure them to a degree on the link aggregation, and also on them being able to use lacp settings to tweak them to a degree, however other than that, I have not the faintest idea what the heck I am doing, and I'm not going to lie here or sugar coat this, I don't know bum diddly about what it is that I am doing, I know what I want to do and I have the hardware given my FreeNAS is a multimedia and backup file server for my own usage and that link aggregation will be what I want out of this, but aside from that, I do not have any idea what I'm doing here with this stuff.......so.....could someone please be kind and help me out here because I do not have any idea what I'm doing aside from the hardware standpoint of plugging things in and getting them up and running as sad as that is to say.

 

[joeschmuck]

While I can't help you with lagg/lacp, I will offer this up...

Post all of your system hardware specs, include your networking gear too. I really doubt someone will hold your hand through the entire process, you will need to learn more about this and maybe you will become a very knowledgeable person willing to help others down the road. Explain what you have tried as well. And whenever you do explain something, pretend the person on the other end is an idiot (they won't be but never assume they understand what you are saying) so that you explain all the details and do not leave anything out.

Also, I would only tackle using 2 Ethernet ports to start with. If you can get 2 ports working then hopefully making a few minor changes will allow you to make it all 4 ports.

I'm curious the outcome of getting a 4 port lagg/lacp to work and the throughput.

 

[danb35]

I'm just going to leave this here: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/lacp-friend-or-foe.30541/

 

[High Voltage]

I read that article you linked danb35 and I didnt understand it when I tried to read it earlier but I did see it.

as for the networking side of things, I have two dell powerconnect managed switches set up to 192.168.10.2 and 192.168.10.3 respectively under their vlan 1 addresses accordingly per switch, i have them set up using the how to article I read here : /http://robwillis.info/2012/12/dell-...tips-basic-setup-and-configuration-via-putty/
and I have not gotten much further from there given it seems that it might be possible that freenas is setting itself up correctly for lacp lagg setup but that my switches might and most likely are NOT setup right to be able to communicate with FreeNAS on its side of things and therefor the rest of my local subnet network and my isolated side of the home network is unable to see the FreeNAS system...I am about 85% sure thats what is not working correctly here, however I have a slightly different model of switch than the articles my local tech shop i just stopped by for some assistance linked me to on what might be going wrong here....so I'm not sure exactly what to do on MY switches online web interface system and unfortunately I dont know enough cli santax to be able to adapt these three articles to my needs specifically...

I have two of these switches, one for my personal networks side of things for all of my computer systems that I want to create a lagg group for ports 22, 23, and 24 on the one switches side because those ports connect to the dedicated switch for my FreeNAS system, and then create two separate lagg groups on the FreeNAS dedicated switch for ports 1, 2 and 3 that are incoming lines from that first switch, that then translate that data connection to another dedicated lagg group for ports 21, 22, 23 and 24 as a lagg group 2 on this one switch that then connects directly to the FreeNAS quad ethernet interface on the motherboard that would be the FreeNAS side lagg group, so to break down my network setup

wifi home router -> wifi repeater to ethernet jack in to my firewall -> line in to firewall (zyxel usg50 with 2x wan in ports) -> lan p4 out setup as vlan 1 out -> dell powerconnect switch 1 -> ditto below
wifi home router -> powerline networking adapter out to my firewall -> line in to firewall (zyxel usg 50 with 2x wan in ports) -> lan p3 out setup as vlan 1 out -> dell powerconnect switch 1 -> dell powerconnect switch 2 -> FreeNAS system

dell powerconnect for FreeNAS system is the one with the ip address of 192.168.10.2 and the one that I use for my general switching of all my systems and pcs and everything else is the 192.168.10.3 vlan ip address.... I hope this helps because i dont understand what I'm not doing...

the web interface for the management systems that these things have, of which I can also login via putty using a serial cable to the console that I dont know what I'm doing in but I can do if directed what to do, contains system, switch, statistics/rmon and qos tabs, of which the switch tab has the link aggregation, vlan, spanning tree, ports, and a few other tabs that I think could be of use if I know what the heck I'm doing in them.....I can physically set up link agg groups but I read in one of the three articles I'll link in a moment, that you need to do more than just set up link agg groups and there is what I KNOW I did not do and why I think this issue resides on the switch side of things and I dont know what to do to fix it on that note.

links respectively for the articles my local tech shop linked me to.:

http://www.dell.com/support/article...-tftp-server-50---kb-article---177932?lang=EN
http://www.dell.com/support/article...-on-a-dell-networking-x-series-switch?lang=EN
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/network-switches/f/866/t/18718870

 

[High Voltage]

the main problem here is I do not understand what it is I'm reading in respects to what I need to do on my end of things to fix this ;n; I'm sorry, I'm having a braindead day today

 

[gpsguy]

A network diagram would be helpful. I read your message a couple of times and still don't understand what you have and/or trying to accomplish.

What are your IP addresses on the LAN side of your wifi home router. Do you have a double NAT? both switches are on the 182.168.10.x network. Why?

 

[High Voltage]

I'm going to make a photoshop image file for my household networking diagram then to be able to help out more, as for why they are on the same network subnet?? I didnt know it was possible, or rather, I didnt know how to set up the switches on separate subnets AND still have my freenas backup server accessible to the systems that would end up being on that separate network, IE I wanted freenas to be able to be seen by my systems on the network I use for the household network, mine, and be able to back my pcs up to my freenas backup server and the only way I knew how to be able to do that, given my lacking knowledge on networking, was to have them all on the same subnet. be back with the image of my household network setup in a few minutes.

 

[High Voltage]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5ZL0jkle7dJZmRBcXVQdG5pMjA/view?usp=sharing
haha, I made the schematic file too big to post here at 7k x 7k pixels to make sure it could be read given I was fitting a lot in that image hahaha....so, google drive link it is haha

 

[High Voltage]

as for the person saying to post what I tried to do, I was not home 'till recently so now that follows:

I have tried to set up the dell powerconnect switches to the same IP subnet as the rest of my personal home network that I personally manage (Mine to be isolated from the remainder of the home network for extra security) of 192.168.5.x and more recently 192.168.10.x setting up my firewall to be the default gateway for my network chunk of 192.168.5.1 and 192.168.10.1 respectively.

I assigned each switch the IP address of 192.168.5/10.2 and 192.168.5/10.3 respectively. both managed switches (dell powerconnect 5324's) have vlans setup at those ip addresses I have listed for them respectively, and I was told that I might need to setup the ability to allow vlans to connect through the lagg interfaces (which I do not know how to do yet) as well as configure lagg more than I have currently given the fact that I have no idea how to go about doing that (note the three articles I linked in earlier posts I made to this thread, because I do not understand what those articles are telling me to go about doing) and those are the steps I have taken so far on the switch and network side of things, as for the freenas side of things


I have set up both via the web interface of freenas before it loses its web connectivity each time, and then therefor from the cli interface from freenas's booted gui at that point, both the creation of lagg interfaces using both lacp and none as the connectivity type, both deleting the primary connected interface for ethernet and not deleting it before and after creating the lagg group and then if doing so after creation of the lagg, then adding it into the lagg and adding/assigning ip addresses to the lagg group of the IP address of 192.168.5/10.5/10 respectively either translating to 192.168.5.5 or 192.168.10.10 respectively while the remaining network was also configured accordingly on the switch and firewall side each time as well so everything matched up on the same subnet.

none of those attempts got things working and I had to revert all those attempted configurations just to be able to even see and access my freenas server each time given that I do not think my switches are working with the lagg configuration.

 

[Jailer]

If you have no idea what you are doing what makes you think you need to do it?

 

[nojohnny101]

@High Voltage I think what some people are skeptical of is that you are asking about how to create an advanced networking setup that you have yet to justify needing. I will admit I have not read all of your posts in this thread but I do know that LACP and LAGG setups don't do what the majority of people think they do. They don't give you more speed.

Can you say why you want to setup LAGG? What's wrong with just one gigabit port being setup and operational. Do you have two internet providers?

 

[gpsguy]

It appears that he only has one.

I'm in the midst of composing a reply asking for more info. I still don't know what he's doing, even if you took LAGG/LACP out of the equation.

Do you have two internet providers?

 

[High Voltage]

okay that explains a lot, yes, I'm fully aware they do not give more speed, that is NOT what I want from it, I want more SIMULTANEOUS THROUGHPUT....I should have specified MORE why it is that I WANT to set this kind of a system up, here's why...I'm a multimedia editor, I have a high end (quote, conservatively between 4 and 10K$ worth of a gaming pc) as well as a handful of other oddball computers, these are only on my end of the network and I also want to allow my folks whom I live with to be able to backup to this backup server as well, now that's just backup purposes were talking about right now, when you also consider I'm going to be installing and configuring plex media server that will be set up to be accessible from throughout the house to play our blue ray and dvd collection of movies anywhere in the house at the same time that I might be backing up personal and important (mission critical important) data to this thing once it is finally set up fully, THAT is why I'm trying to set up a network lagg interface system and why i spent the money on dual managed switches to set it up accordingly... this thing is going to be set up to need the ability long term to have multiple simultaneous streams of data going and coming from it at the same time...

I'm a computer geek of 20 years, I'm fully aware lagg interfaces will not allow faster speed, because if you have a system with, theoretically in this example, 8 Ethernet ports going to and from it, but the systems connecting to it only have a single Ethernet out/in port, yea, the server has 8 all working together in aggregation, but your system your pushing the data to that thing with is still going to bottleneck at its internal individual connection, the only way to fix that is to speed up the speed of each connection and go from single port gig Ethernet to single port 10 gig Ethernet, I cant afford that and that's not my goal here at all on the speed side, its the simultaneous throughput end I'm after here for multiple systems accessing the thing at once and not bogging the single Ethernet connection to the backup server...that's it.

tl:dr I'm trying to set up both a file backup server as well as a media server and the bulk of what I'm personally using to store on this thing is multimedia content for our video collection and my weekly podcast worth of data (about 10 gigs per week of data)

 

[gpsguy]

Your latest message, helps me understand the environment.

Two of your problems, between your systems and the Internet will be your wireless and powerline connections.

What are the inside (LAN) IP addresses on your "wifi router"?

 

[High Voltage]

I'm not worried about this thing being accessible (and honestly I DO NOT want it accessible) from outside the local home network, so the powerline network cable is less of a worry on my end because I will at some point connect a wifi plug to the thing to set it up to our wifi system given that will be how it will be accessed by my parents here at the house, and conversely I will also at that point consider plugging in an additional POE connector directly into the freenas server to allow it also to have direct wired connection to our wifi router via my poe connector that works with my firewall, but thats for another day honestly...

as for the inside lan IP addresses on the wifi router (home router) I'm 99.9% sure (I do not have access to that router given my father has locked me out of it per his control freak tendencies of our home internet (given at one point I tried to run a minecraft server here at the house haha) ) that its the default ISP provided setup of 192.168.1.1 and so on and so fourth and I'm 99.9% positive of this given that when I had my firewall misconfigured (which I found out and fixed yesterday via calling zyxel support) my computers were being assigned IP addresses from our home router "wifi router" that were of the 192.168.1.xxx subnet as confirmed by ipconfig cmd command.

but again, this is going to be a local home network system only, anything needing access to my freenas system by design will need me to be a middle man is my intent on the setup of this thing so as to provide a bit of an additional layer of security for my data, granted its suseptible to exploitation and man-made style of attacks (someone tries to learn about my setup, IE me explaining it like I am here for example) but its something that I will personally feel a bit more comfortable with at the very least at the end of the day......so, I'm going that route just because I'm paranoid....so why not.

again, tl;dr

not worried and dont want outside internet access to this thing, and wifi router is 192.168.1.xxx

 

[gpsguy]

Your current configuration has a double NAT I'd avoid that.

I *think* you should be able to remove the "wifi router" and put the Zyxel firewall in it's place. I'd spend some time studying your Zyxel manual. It's 900+ pages. Sketch out a new network diagram.

At this point, I wouldn't worry about LAGG/LACP, but try to setup a flatter network.

 

[High Voltage]

that is my device, my father would never fathom doing that because he (pardon my rudeness but its true) has a god complex and refuses to listen to a word I tell him on technology in any way shape or form, so that is not possible and I do not even want to humor that migraine of a conversation with him *shudders*

 

[c32767a]

Setting aside the layers of complexity here; even if you get all this plumbed and working as is shown in your drawing, there is still one large caveat.

Your design has 2 link aggregates (LACP is a negotiation/configuration tool, the actual link aggregate works the same if it's staticly defined or negotiated with LACP).

Each of these link aggregates will balance traffic based on an algorithm defined in the switch's chipset. Sometimes these algorithms are configurable. But, in all cases, you don't have granular control of how traffic is actually distributed across the ports in the link aggregate. As an example, if the balancing algorithim is source + destination IP, which is common, all that means is the switch will distribute flows onto the various links based on how the combination of src and dst IP hash into one of 4 buckets. Since one of the IPs is always going to be your NAS, the only "randomness" in the hash is the source IP and there is no guarantee the hash algorithm will evenly distribute the flows across all 4 ports. The IP of your main workstation and secondary workstation may end up hashing to the same aggregate port, while the IP for your internet connected thermostat might end up alone on a different link, which would not be optimal.

VMWare and some server ethernet drivers are better at this, they will actually offer a traffic-aware balancing method, but your average ethernet switch will not.

IMHO, if you have 4 ethernet ports on your NAS and you are determined to distribute traffic across those 4 ports, I would put 1 port on your existing network and then use direct connections on the other 3 to key devices on your network. Give each direct connection a unique IP subnet that doesn't appear anywhere else in your environment and use the appropriate IPs when you mount shares. That would ensure that each device has and will utilize it's own separate path.

 

[pschatz100]

I'm trying to set up both a file backup server as well as a media server and the bulk of what I'm personally using to store on this thing is multimedia content for our video collection and my weekly podcast worth of data (about 10 gigs per week of data)

I looked at this thread yesterday and again today, and I do not understand exactly why you think you need all this gear - but I can understand that you have a lot of time and money invested. I have looked at your diagram and, to me, there are lots of pieces in places that are not "intuitive." I don't understand why the Zyxel firewall is where it is and I don't understand the need for two switches.

If you want your network to be isolated from the rest of the home network, then why don't you just implement your own network separate from the home network?

It would be helpful to:
1) Describe what you want to accomplish, and give an overview of your work flow. No more than four sentences for this (If you can't describe it in four sentences, then think about it until you can...)
2) Details of your FreeNAS system
3) How much throughput do you think you need between devices? What you described above doesn't seem to warrant such an over-the-top solution to me.

Don't forget, this is a FreeNAS forum. We can offer some help with FreeNAS connectivity, but extensive network troubleshooting is beyond the scope of the forum.

 

[High Voltage]

....I totally forgot I posted this thread *facepalms* sorry everyone...I ended up contacting a networking buddy of mine and he helped me to figure out what was going wrong...turns out that the switches I have, are "knock off" cisco switches, making it a pain to try and use ssh for them because they are trying to imitate cisco style switch operating syntax and that was what was throwing me off so bad, on top of the fact I was trying to set up the LAGG groups on the switches as two separate lagg groups when it needs them to be identical and that was the issue I had that was not allowing them to work properly and communicate to each other...problem and thread solved and I'm going to mark this thread as closed and solved...thanks everyone that tried to help me out here. Much appreciated