Switching temporarily to 10G

Sparkey

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Nov 1, 2021
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I have both a 10g Chelsio card and onboard Intel 1g. Most of the time 1g is fine but for moving lots of data I'd like to temporarily switch over to 10g for obvious reasons. I'm thinking that if I power down the server, disconnect the 1g then power back up with the 10g connected and functional that TrueNAS will automatically make the switch but I'm not sure. Any guidance much appreciated.
 

Arwen

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I used something similar with my old Solaris workstation. It had 10/100Mbit Ethernet controller built in, and I had a 1Gbps add on card. With Solaris I put them in a IPMP group, favoring the 1Gbps. But, if my 1Gbps switch was down, (it was noisy and power hungry), I could power it on using the 10/100Mbit port.

In theory you can do the same with LACP. Make the 10Gbps the primary port, and the 1Gbps as the standby port. If the 10Gbps port has link, all traffic will go through it. But, whence you dis-connect it, traffic is routed through the 1Gbps port.

I don't have the details of how to configure that. It depends on a few things, like if you want the same IP in both cases. And which TrueNAS product you are using, Core or SCALE.
 

Sparkey

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Nov 1, 2021
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36
Thanks. I ran into some weirdness. I cannot connect to the 10g port unless the 1g port is also connected. the 10g port shows as up and it pulls an ip address but I can't ping or connect unless I also plug in the 1g cable. When I do I can connect but network traffic is exactly the same for both NIC's and the transfer speed is obviously 1g. I made the connection via the 10g port so you'd think it would transfer at 10g but no, It's definitely 1g. After I'm done with the transfer I'll disable both 1g NIC's in the BIOS and see what happens.
 

Arwen

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Uh, using DHCP can be problematic when using a server, (you stated "it pulls an ip address"...).

You can't have 2 NICs in the same sub-net except under specific conditions, like LACP or Solaris IPMP. If you have both NICs active AND in the same sub-net, the results can be unpredictable. The likely result is that all outbound traffic is sent over the lower numbered IP. Which might be your 1Gbps NIC. But, that is not guaranteed.
 
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Sparkey

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 1, 2021
Messages
36
Uh, using DHCP can be problematic when using a server, (you stated "it pulls an ip address"...).

You can't have 2 NICs in the same sub-net except under specific conditions, like LACP or Solaris IPMP. If you have both NICs active AND in the same sub-net, the results can be unpredictable. The likely result is that all outbound traffic is sent over the lower numbered IP. Which might by your 1Gbps NIC. But, that is not guaranteed.

Thanks, apparently what's happening. Should have disabled the 1g NIC's.
 

Arwen

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Glad I could help. Modern networking can be tricky.
 
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