Dual ethernet connection

[mani]

I just built my second tower . Thsi time I used Supermicro server motherboard- X9 SCM F-0 and everything booted up in first instance. I have started pre clearing the 3TB disks now

This MB has 2 gigabit ethernet ports- if I connect both of them to my home network , will it add to read write speedsor give any other advantage? Will unRAID be able to see and use both ethrnet connections?

 

Thanks

Mani

[burtjr]

No, currently UnRAid will only use one port. You need to disable the other to ensure there are no conflicts.

[Joe L.]

No, currently UnRAid will only use one port. You need to disable the other to ensure there are no conflicts.

newest 5.0beta13 can use both ports on same subnet.  See release notes on how to configure...   

[c234rmf]

And report back please if you get it working...

thanks

[nickcardwell]

assume with the dual bonding , you switch has to support it (trunking) , as in 2 * 1GB , appears as one 2Gb link?

[bubbaQ]

You need a bit more than just server support.  In most cases, you need a switch that supports it too.

[c234rmf]

According to the web link in the release notes I only see one mode that needs a special switch.

I would be interested if anyone tries any of the dual nic modes.

thanks

 

[Rajahal]

No, currently UnRAid will only use one port. You need to disable the other to ensure there are no conflicts.

 

You don't NEED to disable the second NIC, but it doesn't hurt.  unRAID will always just use the first NIC it finds (with the exception of the latest betas).

[mani]

I have cisco Small business managed switches (SG200-50 and SG200-26) that support jumbo frames. Please let me know what settings I need to change in them to try to use both ethernet ports. I am still preclearing 3 TB drives, so dont want to mess with the settings till all preclearing is done.

Other question I have is that my router is WRT610n which doesnt support jumbo frames. If I connect all my PC's to the Cisco switch (SG200-50) and connect one port of the router(WRT 610n) to SG200-50 , will the jumbo frames be supported on the network as the Tower and all the PC's etc accessing it will be connected to the cisco SG200 switch directly , or the data still has to go through the WRT router and that will become the bottle neck?

 

Thanks

Mani

[dgaschk]

Traffic will not go through the router if both hosts are connected to the same switch. Look up channel bonding (also known as "Ethernet bonding") config on the switch.

[mani]

Hi

I looked at the management interface of switch - there is link aggregation (LAG) which I believe is what you mean by port bonding . There are three sub headings to configure:

- LAG management

- LAG settings

-LACP

 

 

And this is what I see in 5. Beta13 release notes;

Changes from 5.0-beta12a to 5.0-beta13

--------------------------------------

- linux: use kernel version 3.1.0

- linux: restore linux r8169 driver

- linux: include 'bonding' module and '/sbin/ifenslave' command

- netatalk: use version 2.2.1

- samba: use version 3.6.1

 

So I assume this bonding module is the one you were referring to., But how do I use this comand. What exactly do I need to do in unraid  for it to be able to use both ethernet ports simultaneously.?

 

 

 

Does anyone have any experience with these. I will like to give it a try

 

Thanks

Mani

[mani]

I looked at the link in the release notes. I am not well versed with Linux and am not very clear how to make it work in unraid. I am also not clear about configuring the ports , because the link in release note says not to configure the two ports? Also I am not clear if the port bonding which the script does is same as link aggragation that I have in the configuration options for my switch. If anyone is using this successfully , please share the details...will appreciate it

 

Thanks

Mani

[nickcardwell]

I looked at the link in the release notes. I am not well versed with Linux and am not very clear how to make it work in unraid. I am also not clear about configuring the ports , because the link in release note says not to configure the two ports? Also I am not clear if the port bonding which the script does is same as link aggragation that I have in the configuration options for my switch. If anyone is using this successfully , please share the details...will appreciate it

 

Thanks

Mani

Yep link aggregation /port bonding are the same.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

[mani]

Sweet... so at least my switches are good to go....

 

Do you know how to configure the unraid ? What commands to exactly type in the console?

Do I confifure the ports on my switch before or after the unraid is configured? Somewhere in the link on release notes its says not to configure ports?

 

Thanks

Mani

[olssy]

Been working on this for the past hour but so far not much success... I'm using this link from the release notes as "inspiration":

http://www.sgvulcan.com/network-interface-bonding-in-slackware-version-13-1/

I put this in network.cfg:

 

IFNAME[4]="bond0"

IPADDR[4]="XXX.XX.XX.XX"

NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0"

USE_DHCP[4]=""

DHCP_HOSTNAME[4]=""

 

And gave it the same IP it already had(static).

 

Then I launched these commands:

 

            modprobe bonding mode=balance-rr miimon=100

            modprobe tg3

            ifconfig bond0 up

            ifenslave bond0 eth0

            ifenslave bond0 eth1

 

And now ifconfig shows bond0, eth0 and eth1 all with the same HWaddr and eth1 and bond0 both having transmitted 4KB with a total of 105KB received from both eth0 and eth1. All that to say some network activity seems to have taken place but I'm too tired to fire up wireshark tonight to see what it was. I'm going to try one more time tonight by enabling DHCP, if it succeeds  I'll post before going offline.

 

[mani]

Been working on this for the past hour but so far not much success... I'm using this link from the release notes as "inspiration":

http://www.sgvulcan.com/network-interface-bonding-in-slackware-version-13-1/

I put this in network.cfg:

 

IFNAME[4]="bond0"

IPADDR[4]="XXX.XX.XX.XX"

NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0"

USE_DHCP[4]=""

DHCP_HOSTNAME[4]=""

 

And gave it the same IP it already had(static).

Then I launched these commands:

 

            modprobe bonding mode=balance-rr miimon=100

            modprobe tg3

            ifconfig bond0 up

            ifenslave bond0 eth0

            ifenslave bond0 eth1

 

And now ifconfig shows bond0, eth0 and eth1 all with the same HWaddr and eth1 and bond0 both having transmitted 4KB with a total of 105KB received from both eth0 and eth1. All that to say some network activity seems to have taken place but I'm too tired to fire up wireshark tonight to see what it was. I'm going to try one more time tonight by enabling DHCP, if it succeeds  I'll post before going offline.

 

 

 

Any more luck??

[olssy]

Nope, just started at it again... but I can't  find documentation for my switch to see if it supports bonding. Next step I'll try and boot up with nothing in my network.cfg, then I'll try and modify the rc files as in that tutorial for slackware and then I'll issue a

/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1  restart

 

Hopefully when the network services go back up I'll have an IP... From what I read the bond0, eth0 and eth1 should all have the same MAC adress and ip if it works, I'll post back in 5 minutes to let you know if it worked.

 

Does anyone know if I can put BASH scripts in my network.cfg? I'm so new to UnRaid and unfortunately I lack the time to hack away at it like I'd like to

[mani]

Nope, just started at it again... but I can't  find documentation for my switch to see if it supports bonding. Next step I'll try and boot up with nothing in my network.cfg, then I'll try and modify the rc files as in that tutorial for slackware and then I'll issue a

/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1   restart

 

Hopefully when the network services go back up I'll have an IP... From what I read the bond0, eth0 and eth1 should all have the same MAC adress and ip if it works, I'll post back in 5 minutes to let you know if it worked.

 

Does anyone know if I can put BASH scripts in my network.cfg? I'm so new to UnRaid and unfortunately I lack the time to hack away at it like I'd like to

 

What switch are you using? Can you go to the management site of your switch and it should have an option for link aggregation pr bonding if it supports it?

 

Mani

[olssy]

Well I tried once and restarted network services but nothing happened and I couldn't manually put bond0 up This lead me to believe that there was a typo in one of the scripts I modified... I started double checking and my machine locked up, had to reboot twice for it to come alive again but no luck with the bonding.

If I knew a bit more about UnRaid I think I would have gotten this to work quite quickly but I have no idea how to circumvent the fact that most everything but /boot/ gets restored on rebooting. I mean it makes sense that UnRaid is made this way I just wish I knew how the go script ties in with everything else...

 

Ok, tried a few things to no avail, the last thing I tried was a simple network.cfg that looked like this:

IFNAME[4]="bond0"

IPADDR[4]="192.168.0.195"

NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0"

USE_DHCP[4]="NO"

 

After booting up I then did my modprobes, brought bond0 up and enslaved eth0 and eth1 to bond0 but I still don't have an IP adress...

 

Then I did the same thing trying to use DHCP like so:

IFNAME[4]="bond0"

USE_DHCP[4]="YES"

...

 

Abnd still no IP. It seems I am doing something wrong if I don't have an IP even when I specify a static ip... I also wonder if the router and ARP tables might not be confused if the IP changes but the MAC address is the same... or vice-versa... I'm getting a bit tired of doing this, I'll take a little break and then get at it by looking over the logs.

 

As for my switch, its a Belkin F5D5141-8 v3 8-port gigabit switch. there is no management console, it's one of those cheap budget consumer switches. If anyone has any suggestions what else I should try then go ahead and post them, I'll try them later tonight.

 

[mani]

I think switch may be an issue , you will need managed switch where you can link/bond 2 ports

[olssy]

Success at last!

Ok, not the prettiest way to get this to work and have to redo it upon rebooting but for anyone wanting to give it a try here is what I did.

Modified network.cfg to try and get a static ip like so:

IFNAME[4]="bond0"

IPADDR[4]="192.168.0.191"

NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0"

USE_DHCP[4]="NO"

 

That ip was the one the server had before and is reserved on my router. That said, when the server booted it didn't have the bond0 up. So I did the 2 modprobes, then ifconfig bond0 up and enslaved eth0 and eth1 to bond0 but I still didn't have my ip. Tried a few things like restarting rc.inet1 and rc.inet2 and ifplugd.action down then up but nothing worked. So I looked at the ifconfig man page and saw I could specify an IP when I brought an interface up so I tried it like so:

ifconfig bond0 down

ifconfig bond0 192.168.0.191 netmask 255.255.255.0

 

Then I checked with ifconfig and I had an IP! Then I tried pinging machines on my network from the UnRaid box and it worked! Then tried to browse from an Ubuntu machine and saw my flash drive! While writing this I put my array online and an going to see if my throughput changed... Oh, the Web interface seems to be loading much slower now...

 

and voila! 1.7Mbs transfer speed with bonding! Who knows what went wrong but something sure seems to have.

 

And now for ifperf, I was getting around 590 Mbs before and already wasn't satisfied with it and now, with bonding, I get 78Kbs.

 

I think I'll give up for bonding right now and concentrate on getting one of my NICs functioning at top speed instead. Hopefully this will help others to test out bonding and with a bit of luck and sweat, get better results than me.

 

[olssy]

Read up a bit on switches and I think you're right Mani, the slow speed was probably due to a ton of errors because my switch got confused or something. But, I found out there are two other modes that don't require a special switch, I'll be trying them out later tonight or tomorrow morning, they are:

balance-tlb and balance-alb

Unfortunately, I still have some kind of issue with my server as I only get about 40MBps and got between 60-80MBs when I tested UnRaid on my desktop with the same drives.

[mani]

Any more luck with it...!

Any one else has any experience with setting it up

 

Thanks

Mani

[stomp]

I'm also very interested if someone manages to make link aggregation works with the last beta. Also what kind of router do you need? Does it have to be server grade router? Because I can't find "Private Customer" router that supports LA. Or at least it's not explicitly mentioned...

[mani]

I am using Cisco small business  series switches an they LA in the management console