Teaming with FreeNAS

[Thorn57]

Hi everyone, 

im running a FreeNAS server (i5-2400, 14gb ram, 4x500gb raidz1, 3x2tb raid z2, old lsi sas hba) which i want to acces from my desktop (i7-6700k, 16gb ram, 960 evo) with more than gigabit speeds. I purchased some 2 port intel nics of ebay and have a mangaed 8 port tp-linkTL-SG2008 switch even though with an other windows machine i can use the bandwith i was not able to set freenas up to do so. And I was wondering wether there is an option to get better speeds with my hardware.

Help is greatly appreciated

[TapfererToaster]

If you don't set up the teaming/lacp/trunking in windows and the switch, windows will use SMB multipath. something that in this use case is superior to lacp since it can be use in a 1on1  connection.

This means that all interfaces work with their standard configuration (get ip addresses etc) and windows figures everything else out.

 

Problem is, that multipath is not yet final in SAMBA -> no mulitpath on unix systems. So you are left with trunkint/lacp on freenas, which does not really help you with only one server and a client, or switching to a windows solution for your server till SAMBA gets multipath.

[Thorn57]

So you are basically saying that with freenas i can not get speeds> 1gb with this hardware and my options for better speeds are using windows on the server, waiting 2 years for mulipath on SAMBA or getting faster nics. 

Would there be any option to get multipath working on freenas

 

[TapfererToaster]

As far as i know, there is no way to get multipath on freenas right now. But it was a few months ago when i checked and then the newest SAMBA version had it in as BETA function (that didn't really work yet). So i dunno if they accomplished anything major yet.

 

With teaming you would be able to get 1gbps+ speeds, too. But only on the server side and with multiple user. It basically still uses only one interface when sending one stream to a destination. So if you got 2 destinations, it could send streams on both interfaces and so reach 1gpbs+. 

 

EDIT: Sorry, i just noticed, i meant MULTICHANNEL not multipath.

[GDRRiley]

consider just grabbing some some cheap 10gb network cards (if you want RG-45 asus has some new for 100$ each or if you go used you can find older standers for cheaper) and run direct attach it is a lot less work to set up 

 

[Thorn57]

I considered the the 10g option but the asus cards are about 110€ and then i would need about 30m of cat7 which would come to an extimated cost of 250€ which is a bit to musch imo. 

I did however find that mulipath is included in samba 4.4.0 which would mean i would have to update samba on the freenas server because it is currently on version 4.3.11 however this is quiet hard especially since i dont have a lot of experiece with freebsd.

It would be nice if anybody with some experience could help me with that or if anybody knows whether freenas 11 has the right version of samba

[Ramaddil]

8 minutes ago, Thorn57 said:

I considered the the 10g option but the asus cards are about 110€ and then i would need about 30m of cat7 which would come to an extimated cost of 250€ which is a bit to musch imo. 

I did however find that mulipath is included in samba 4.4.0 which would mean i would have to update samba on the freenas server because it is currently on version 4.3.11 however this is quiet hard especially since i dont have a lot of experiece with freebsd.

It would be nice if anybody with some experience could help me with that or if anybody knows whether freenas 11 has the right version of samba

Cat 6a would work fine for 10GB

[TapfererToaster]

1 hour ago, Thorn57 said:

I did however find that mulipath is included in samba 4.4.0 which would mean i would have to update samba on the freenas server because it is currently on version 4.3.11 however this is quiet hard especially since i dont have a lot of experiece with freebsd.

It would be nice if anybody with some experience could help me with that or if anybody knows whether freenas 11 has the right version of samba

 

I just checked on my 11.0-U2 test VM and it has "Samba version 4.6.4-GIT-a4e6101" installed.

Then googled around a bit and came across this post on reddit: 

So it seems that even tho the feature is still experimental, it seems to be doable. just make sure not to use it in critical environments.

 

I will try setting up a test-system later next week and see if it works with Freenas 11.

 

[Thorn57]

Wow, thanks very much im going to update to freenas 11 and give it a try. Its hopefully gonna be uch easier than using the comandline to try and update samba. 

Thank you for finding that reddit post

[Thorn57]

Well I got to the part where I have the faster transferspeeds one way but now i dont konw where and how to add the routes. Sorry for being a noob

[TapfererToaster]

ok, i got curious and tried it out myself.

 

 

 

if you can send faster already, the step left is only to add the static routes.

I normally do not use FreeBSD, so if someone spot something that could be done a better way, please leave a comment.

 

on my windows side it looked like this:

 

 

And on my server side 192.168.178.89 is em0 and .93 is em1

so i enabled ssh on my freenas box and typed in the following:

 

root@freenas:~ # route add -host 192.168.178.25 -interface em0

root@freenas:~ # route add -host 192.168.178.46 -interface em1

 

that got me a routing table like this:

 

root@freenas:~ # netstat -rn
Routing tables

Internet:
Destination          Gateway                           Flags     Netif Expire
default                  192.168.178.1                 UGS         em0
127.0.0.1                 link#3                            UH          lo0
192.168.178.0/24   link#1                           U           em0
192.168.178.25     00:0c:29:48:0d:5f          UHS         em0
192.168.178.46     00:0c:29:48:0d:69            UHS         em1
192.168.178.89     link#1                          UHS         lo0
192.168.178.93     link#2                           UHS         lo0
 

and with that it worked for me.

 

I THINK that those entries will be gone after a reboot, so yeah.. need to look into that when i implement it on my main server.

i guess you could make a small script that writes those lines after boot.. or i think in freeBSD you write them in /etc/rc.conf so they survive a reboot - but I'm not sure about what kind of format the file requires.

 

[Thorn57]

For now it is working I got 350MB/s testing with crystal diskmark which is probaply the best the spinning rust in the server can do and it's fine for me. I hope it's not going to break.

I feel like this infromation should be on the freenas homepage because this is by far the best method of increasing transfer speeds with a homeserver.

Thanks very much for your help. 

 

PS.: Lustig dass der erste den man hier trift auch deutsch ist.

Edited July 23, 2017 by Thorn57

[Thorn57]

Sorry for reviving this thread but i have an issue relating to this. So I had some trouble with internet connectivity which lead my to resetting the nics. Now after getting everything back up i couldn't connect to the freenas box using my main pc. However when i dont have the routes configured, that are needed for smb multichannel on freenas i can connect to the freenas server. So now i m wondering what i did wrong and how i can have smb multichannel working again

[Thorn57]

I found the issue: static lag on the switch