Odd Networking (DNS?) problem.

[GrahamBB]

I have a very odd problem.

I run a FreeNAS server on a mesh network, with the FN plugged into one Eero access point. It has been running for over a year with no particular issues.

I upgraded to 11.1-U4 on the 25th of last month and since very shortly after that the entire network will drop offline or have extremely long website connection times - as though there was a dns resolution problem.

I suspected Comcast and we had the engineer out and no issues on the cable. To cut a long story short, by a process of elimination we isolated the garage AP (where the FN is). I ran the network without anything connected to the AP by hard wire and all was fine. Ran 24 hours, high speeds, no drops. Today I plugged in the hard-wired switches (to which the FN is connected), and immediately had problems: eventually getting down to only having the RN directly connected (all other wired elements disconnected). With the RN plugged in I get the symptoms, unplugged, all works as expected.

The symptoms are wildly varying networks speeds (on Speedtest), complete dropouts to the external (Comcast) network and very slow initial (about 20% of the load bar in a web browser) connection and then more rapid loading.

I have double checked the FN settings and only have SMB and SSH services running. Performance over SMB is good and file copies and music streaming work as expected.

For the life of me I cannot see what this can be, or how FN can have this effect. I'm clutching at straws here, but any thoughts or ideas would be most welcome.

Cheers

 

[joeschmuck]

Readynas

You mean FreeNAS?

I ran the network without anything connected to the AP by hard wire and all was fine.

So the AP seems to be the suspect hardware.

I think your explanation is a bit difficult to follow. I'm not sure you are using the terms properly. I think you are calling a WiFi Router an AP but maybe not. If you are then please use proper terminology because it's very difficult to understand what is going on and we would like to give you good advice to fix the problem.

A few things to do...
1) Change your Ethernet cable, they can go bad without any notice.
2) Roll back to the previous version of FreeNAS, if that fixes the problem then submit a problem report.
3) Your NIC could be going bad, maybe you can add a new NIC and disable the onboard one.
4) Be cleared in what is happening and explain your network layout. For example I'm attaching my network layout as an example for you.

Good Luck

 

[GrahamBB]

Well that WAS a Freudian slip. Fixed :_(

 

[GrahamBB]

You mean FreeNAS?


So the AP seems to be the suspect hardware.

I think your explanation is a bit difficult to follow. I'm not sure you are using the terms properly. I think you are calling a WiFi Router an AP but maybe not. If you are then please use proper terminology because it's very difficult to understand what is going on and we would like to give you good advice to fix the problem.

A few things to do...
1) Change your Ethernet cable, they can go bad without any notice.
2) Roll back to the previous version of FreeNAS, if that fixes the problem then submit a problem report.
3) Your NIC could be going bad, maybe you can add a new NIC and disable the onboard one.
4) Be cleared in what is happening and explain your network layout. For example I'm attaching my network layout as an example for you.

Good Luck

View attachment 23795

I'll try all your suggestions, thanks.

The network is an Eero wireless mesh (used as I'm in a rental and can't pull wires). I think it unlikely that the Eero in the garage is the problem as it works OK with other hardwired hardware plugged in.

I'll report back after trying your suggestions. Thanks.

 

[GrahamBB]

I believe I have narrowed it down to when the Backblaze cloud backup task is running.

 

[joeschmuck]

Good news, narrowing the problem down is a good step the the right direction.

 

[c32767a]

I believe I have narrowed it down to when the Backblaze cloud backup task is running.

A typical mesh failure mode would be overtaxing the mesh backhaul link to wherever your ISP connection is. Depending on your RF environment and quality of connectivity between mesh nodes, a stream from your backblaze backup could result in poor mesh performance and the behavior you describe. Most consumer mesh products aren't optimized for use cases that continuously stress their backhaul links.

This is outside the scope of this forum, but other possible options for you would be a Homeplug, MOCA or ADSL extender like https://www.netsys-direct.com/products/kit-hyperxtender-er-ethernet-extender-nv-202ekit. Homeplug is probably the best option.

 

[GrahamBB]

A typical mesh failure mode would be overtaxing the mesh backhaul link to wherever your ISP connection is. Depending on your RF environment and quality of connectivity between mesh nodes, a stream from your backblaze backup could result in poor mesh performance and the behavior you describe. Most consumer mesh products aren't optimized for use cases that continuously stress their backhaul links.

This is outside the scope of this forum, but other possible options for you would be a Homeplug, MOCA or ADSL extender like https://www.netsys-direct.com/products/kit-hyperxtender-er-ethernet-extender-nv-202ekit. Homeplug is probably the best option.

This seems very close to the mark.

Unfortunately, I can find little documentation on Cloud Sync, nothing on BB specifically, and certainly nothing on setting options - such as limiting bandwidth for a task - in the docs. Am I missing it or does it not exist?

As far as I can see, FreeNAS is using Rclone (standard?), can this be tuned directly?

Cheers

 

[c32767a]

This seems very close to the mark.

Unfortunately, I can find little documentation on Cloud Sync, nothing on BB specifically, and certainly nothing on setting options - such as limiting bandwidth for a task - in the docs. Am I missing it or does it not exist?

As far as I can see, FreeNAS is using Rclone (standard?), can this be tuned directly?

Cheers

I don't have an answer for that.. I don't use the cloud backup options.

If it's generic unix rsync, you'd just need to add --bwlimit=xx to the command line, where xx is some number appropriate for your connection.

Another option would be to ask eero if there's any way to match the source IP and destination port of a particular flow and de-prioritize it. Give all your other traffic priority and let the flow from the NAS to the cloud backup service have best effort. Then you'd just need to know the details of the flows that are created by backblaze backup so you could tell the eeros what to look for.. That would allow the box that has the best picture of the conditions on your wireless backhaul decide how much bandwidth to allocate to your backup flows.