TrueNAS not getting Gigabit speed

[UserSN]

Hello Everyone,

I've noticed that my router shows my freenas box is running at 100speed not 1000gigabit. I've checked my cable & nic which is an onboard card and TrueNAS is not setting it to 1000base.

I've used the following in shell:
1) ifconfig em0 192.168.10.11 media 1000baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
Once I run this command in shell it sets it to 1000 base but I loose connectivity.
I have to revert back to 100baseTX for the box to show up on the network.

Cables:
I just ran a new cable Cat6, re-crimped the tips on the cable ensured that it's correct so I know the cable is not the problem.

Motherboard:
I checked the NIC on the motherboard and confirm it is a 10/100/1000 NIC (Motherboard Intel DH55HC) https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/42409/intel-desktop-board-dh55hc.html

External NIC:
I even installed 2 spare NIC's I had and they don't even show up in TrueNAS, might be because their old? But they are 1000.
D-Link DGE530T

Gigabit Desktop PCI Adapter DGE-530T

Add high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to any system with a PCI expansion slot.

www.dlink.com

So i'm not sure why these DLINK nics don't even show up on TrueNAS? Maybe drivers?
Any help or ideas appreciated!

 

[JohnDigital]

What router model? Are sure all your network equipment is gigabit rated?

 

[UserSN]

Its a high-end netgear router fully gigabit capable. I've drilled it down to some problem with the OS (truenas) not using the NIC in 1000tx mode for whatever reason.

 

[Borja Marcos]

My apologies if I ask a stupid question, but:

Did you crimp the eight conductors on the cable?

Did you respect the cable pairings? I mean, pins 1 and 2 must be the same twisted pair, 7 and 8, 3 and 6, 4 and 5. I have seen this mistake lots of times unfortunately.

If you disable auto negotiation you must disable it on both sides. So if you try to force 1 GbE on FreeNAS, do the same on the router.

 

[jgreco]

Cables:
I just ran a new cable Cat6, re-crimped the tips on the cable ensured that it's correct so I know the cable is not the problem.

How does thing A prove thing B here?

I don't see the words "and used my cable tester to make sure all pairs are good" anywhere.

Gigabit ethernet requires all four pairs to be perfect, whereas 10M and 100M only require orange and green. A gigabit link failing to come up and coming up as 100M instead is the classic symptom of a miswired cable.

I even installed 2 spare NIC's I had and they don't even show up in TrueNAS, might be because their old? But they are 1000.
D-Link DGE530T

Gigabit Desktop PCI Adapter DGE-530T

Add high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to any system with a PCI expansion slot.

www.dlink.com

So i'm not sure why these DLINK nics don't even show up on TrueNAS? Maybe drivers?

The *vast* majority of ethernet cards out there are not suitable for FreeNAS. Most of them are built as cheaply as possible from the cheapest chipsets in the hyper-competitive PC market, and may not even have a FreeBSD driver. Writing a high quality driver requires at a minimum access to documentation on the chipset, which many manufacturers guard jealously, or better yet a vendor-authored driver. The classic example is the excellent Intel FreeBSD driver for most of their cards, authored by Intel staff. Many other cards have been reverse-engineered by the FreeBSD and Linux driver teams, but this is kinda like building a car out of patchwork parts - it'll work, but not as well as a car built from the ground up with custom engineered parts.

 

[UserSN]

I didn't disable auto negotiation on the router side, I will see if that's an option for me. The Router is a R6700v2

I didn't use a cable tester but crimped the cable ends off of the diagram below both ends are the same.
I've made 10 cables using the same method and all my other 10 cables on different machines pull gigabit that's why
I'm assuming the cables are not the problem, but I may be wrong?

As for the NIC just to be on a safe side I ordered a new NIC from amazon and it's giving me the same issues. I plugged it into
my windows PC and it gets gigabit, but not on the TrueNAS box.

Amazon.com: EDUP Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express PCI-E Network Card 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 LAN Adapter Converter for Desktop PC: Computers & Accessories

Buy EDUP Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express PCI-E Network Card 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 LAN Adapter Converter for Desktop PC: Network Cards - Amazon.com ✓ FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases

www.amazon.com

Also I'm using TrueNAS 12 maybe theres a bug?

 

[Borja Marcos]

I didn't disable auto negotiation on the router side, I will see if that's an option for me. The Router is a R6700v2

In theory autonegotiation is a requirement for Gigabit Ethernet. If only because the four cable pairs are used in full duplex.

Some equipment allows you to disable autonegotiation but in that case you must disable it for both ends. The same applied to the typical problems with Fast Ethernet. If you disabled only one end the other would assume 100 Mbps half duplex.

I didn't use a cable tester but crimped the cable ends off of the diagram below both ends are the same.
I've made 10 cables using the same method and all my other 10 cables on different machines pull gigabit that's why
I'm assuming the cables are not the problem, but I may be wrong?

So the cable seems to be fine. Sorry about assuming it, but I've seen all kinds of paranormal phenomena with improperly cabled connectors. Many people are not aware of the pairs issue.


The question would be: Which chip does it use?

 

[jgreco]

I didn't use a cable tester but crimped the cable ends off of the diagram below both ends are the same.
I've made 10 cables using the same method and all my other 10 cables on different machines pull gigabit that's why
I'm assuming the cables are not the problem, but I may be wrong?

I'd wager you're wrong.

A professional cabling guy using quality consumables will see a few percent failure on custom patch cables. Either end being bad results in the assembly failing. Most pros do not find it worth the time and effort to sit there and stare at it under a loupe in order to reduce the failure rates by maybe another percent.

I'm not a professional cabling guy though I do have five figures worth of crimps under my belt and have trained numerous people. I learned on the telecom stuff and worked on that for many years, and have since switched to the expensive EZRJ45 stuff simply because I do a lot of "custom to-length" rack work where half an inch makes a lot of difference in the final appearance. Also, it's expensive to be staged to a data center so expensive supplies actually work out to be cheaper.

If you do all the right things - high quality stranded cable, EZRJ45 crimps, a proper crimp tool (not a $20 Asian special), etc., with lots of experience, you can STILL see a 1% failure rate.

I don't know what you're using or what you might have done wrong. One of the most common errors is using solid core cable to make patch cables. One of the next is to use cheap crimps. A third is to use a cheap crimper. But bad technique can get you too.

Your gear is basically telling you you've got a cabling problem. Go get one of the eBay cheapie testers, they're about $20 and they will identify shorts and opens. Look at your connectors under a loupe for any signs of the conductors being mis-seated, misordered, pins being driven askew or at an angle, pins not seated properly, etc.

It's possible it isn't a cabling problem. So also inspect the ethernet JACKS because sometimes a jack can be bad, where someone shoved a badly done crimp in and bent a terminal. Try a different cable.

As for the NIC just to be on a safe side I ordered a new NIC from amazon and it's giving me the same issues. I plugged it into
my windows PC and it gets gigabit, but not on the TrueNAS box.

Amazon.com: EDUP Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express PCI-E Network Card 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 LAN Adapter Converter for Desktop PC: Computers & Accessories

Buy EDUP Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express PCI-E Network Card 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 LAN Adapter Converter for Desktop PC: Network Cards - Amazon.com ✓ FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases

www.amazon.com

That's not likely to work on FreeBSD. We generally recommend the Intel desktop CT adapter as an inexpensive high quality ethernet interface.

 

[UserSN]

Hi jgreco,

Unless the length of cable I pulled for that 1 cable is somehow compromised (which doesn't make sense) because that exact cable pulls gigabit fine from router -> windows but not from router -> TrueNAS. I don't see how the issue is the cable.

I also tested 5 other of the 10 cables I made and they all work (gigabit) from router -> windows but don't work (gigabit) router -> TrueNAS.

Connectors:

Amazon.com

Cable:

Amazon.com

Crimp Tool:

https://www.lowes.com/pd/IDEAL-FT-45-Feed-Thru-Modular-Plug-Data-Crimper/1000321537

I think the chip on the EDUP pci card is a Realtek. At this point i'm going to try installed FreeNAS 11.x instead of TrueNAS and see if that makes a difference. Will revert back with any new findings.

 

[UserSN]

In theory autonegotiation is a requirement for Gigabit Ethernet. If only because the four cable pairs are used in full duplex.

Some equipment allows you to disable autonegotiation but in that case you must disable it for both ends. The same applied to the typical problems with Fast Ethernet. If you disabled only one end the other would assume 100 Mbps half duplex.


So the cable seems to be fine. Sorry about assuming it, but I've seen all kinds of paranormal phenomena with improperly cabled connectors. Many people are not aware of the pairs issue.


The question would be: Which chip does it use?

Hello Borja,

So I didn't see anyway of disabling the negotiation on the router, it is a high-end (consumer-grade) router but it's only for my home-office and doesn't have the complete configuration parameters my switch @ work has so I can't toggle that from the router side, I could only force 1000TX mode from TrueNAS's side.

I'm not sure what chip it is I found the driver here:

EP-9602 Driver | EDUP

www.szedup.com

 

[JohnDigital]

Pick up a dual or quad port intel nic on ebay for under 15 bucks usually. Ive had moderate success wth Broadcom chips too. Just make sure its something server class and youll be all good.

 

[joeschmuck]

@UserSN
I'd recommend that you could try to boot up FreeBSD and see how that works. You can also use Ubuntu.
If you boot these and the adapter works a gigabit speeds then you know the adapter and cable works. What that tells you is TrueNAS does not have that driver built in.

However even if that is the case, your old driver will may not get built into TrueNAS.

If after doing the steps above still fail to give you the gigabit speeds then either your adapter is in question, or cable, or there is no driver support.

The problem with all these things, assuming there is no hardware failure, you would need to obtain a better NIC adapter. I can confirm that an Intel NIC is significantly better than a RealTek NIC. I have no idea what your motherboard accepts but I purchased a EXPI9302CTBLK model and it worked great, but that was a 2 port card, you could buy a single port card and save a few dollars.

Good Luck

 

[UserSN]

Good Morning Everyone,

This is truly mind blowing, today I received my Intel Gigabit NIC

Amazon.com

It's now plugged-in and now my router/TrueNAS box is negotiating in gigabit speed. I see the following in ifconfig:

inet 10.0.1.50 netmask 0xffffff00 brodcast 10.0.1.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
nd6 options=9<PERFORMUD, IFDISABLED>

However when transferring a test file of 5GB my speed is incredibly slow in the double digit KB range where before even in non-gigabit I was at least hitting 5-10MB/s

I've ran an iperf test and these are the results:

1st:
10.0.1.50 port 5001 connected with 10.0.1.25 port 53156
0.0-10.9 sec 6.63MBytes 5.10 Mbits/sec

2nd:
10.0.1.50 port 5001 connected with 10.0.1.25 port 52990
0.0-10.1 26.4 MBytes 22.Mbits/sec

3rd:
10.0.1.50 port 5001 connected with 10.0.1.25 port 52989
0.0-10.5sec 28.4MBytes 22.7 Mbits/sec

My speeds are worst than before, WTF is going on?

 

[jgreco]

Clearly something's wrong.

Amazon is well-known for fake cards, even pretty decent looking ones. I'd like to hope that's not a problem, but did the card come in high quality packaging?

My other suggestion would be to try directly connecting your server and PC to run the tests back to back. This may require some manual configuration, but the best solution in cases like this is to reduce complexity. Run a professionally made patch cable from your PC to your NAS, configure static IP addresses, and then try iperf. If you cannot get full gigabit speeds, then something is fundamentally wrong. If that works, then slowly introduce cables and devices from your environment back into the mix.

 

[JohnDigital]

What settings did you mess with (if any, not to be presumptuous) trying to get the other one to be gigabit? Things that might carry over to this card especially at the router. Can you do a laptop via a patch cable from its gb rj45 port with a static ip in the subnet, cabled directly to this intel nic in you TN box and run iperf both ways?

 

[Borja Marcos]

So I didn't see anyway of disabling the negotiation on the router, it is a high-end (consumer-grade) router but it's only for my home-office and doesn't have the complete configuration parameters my switch @ work has so I can't toggle that from the router side, I could only force 1000TX mode from TrueNAS's side.

Then you are forcing nothing I'm afraid. Actually there is a lot of equipment that won't allow you to disable negotiation for GbE because GbE requires it. Anyway I repeat: either you have negotiation enabled on both sides or none.

As for "I found a driver here", there are several important threads on this forum explaining why you must be picky with hardware.

 

[UserSN]

@John Digital
I messed around with adding new drivers for the Realtek card but on restart all that in the config file was deleted so i's pretty free on the TrueNAS side everything is back as it was.

No changes were ever made on the router. If I plug machine to machine shouldn't the cable be a cross-over?

 

[UserSN]

Then you are forcing nothing I'm afraid. Actually there is a lot of equipment that won't allow you to disable negotiation for GbE because GbE requires it. Anyway I repeat: either you have negotiation enabled on both sides or none.

As for "I found a driver here", there are several important threads on this forum explaining why you must be picky with hardware.

@Borja Marcos everything is on auto-negotiate, I'm using a new intel NIC on TrueNAS so I've not needed to force negotiation to 1000TX it automatically picked up as that.

 

[JohnDigital]

@John Digital
I messed around with adding new drivers for the Realtek card but on restart all that in the config file was deleted so i's pretty free on the TrueNAS side everything is back as it was.

No changes were ever made on the router. If I plug machine to machine shouldn't the cable be a cross-over?

As long as both cards are modern gigabit cards they will detect it.

 

[JohnDigital]

Something else to try, would be a regular internet speedtest from the TN box (assuming you have a faster than 100mb connection) can the internet test saturate it?

Install this in a functioning jail pkg install py37-speedtest-cli then run speedtest-cli at the jails cli