I broke things..

[bcredeur97]

This is more of a funny little story than anything:

So it was like 11pm last night and I had a sudden urge to link aggregate two ports on my PFsense router to get an effective 2gb uplink through the router to the rest of the LAN at home... more because "why not" and because I wanted to than anything.

So I get on the web interface and then realize that my plan isn't going to work with only 3 interfaces total on my router. 1 needs to be the WAN, and I can't unassign the LAN port to aggregate it with previously my unused OPT port because in the process I will effectively remove my only way to access the config interface.

Then... genius idea! use a USB ethernet dongle temporarily to maintain access!

With that I was able to create the aggregation.. I enabled it with the LACP protocol and everything was looking good (this is where I messed up -- my dumb 16port unmanaged switch will never work with this protocol). I then realized I had one shot at this... either everything was going to break when  I enabled it once I switched the newly created interface over to it's "LAN" assignment and I'd have to reinstall the OS and reload from my backup. Or it would work and i'd be happy.

Switched it over... adjusted cabling as needed... and of course as these things go... it didn't work.

So oh well.. just plug in a screen and reinstall the OS and restore that from a backup right? Wrong. Dug through my usual bag of cables to dig out a VGA cable (the little optiplex I use for pfsense only has VGA/DP and I don't have a DP compatible monitor). I found no cable. I then realized I left it at my dad's office last time I was over there.. which is a good 10 miles away.

So there I am realizing I could not fix this that night. I managed to break the entire home network permanently until effectively after work the next day. Luckily the family is pretty forgiving and no one is really home during the day... but man... I messed that up just a bit

All for some stupid Link aggregation I'd barely benefit from anyway (though I do move files around from device-device a lot with samba shares so that maybe would of helped)

 

tl;dr: Don't make big changes to your already overly-sophiscated-than-it-needs-to-be network @ 11pm during a weekday

[Windows7ge]

When moving files between devices on the same network the transfer goes up to the switch and it checks if the destination MAC matches anything in the table. If it does it'll send it strait to the destination device bypassing the router. Communications generally only go to the router when either:

 

A. Packets are destined for another network

B. A particular application or protocol requires a default gateway.

 

SAMBA is responsible for handling SMB on Linux so if this is a SMB transfer then attempting to Link Aggregate the connection between the router & the switch would have realistically only increased your bandwidth access for your clients to the internet (if it were over 1Gbit) or another private network.

[bcredeur97]

27 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

When moving files between devices on the same network the transfer goes up to the switch and it checks if the destination MAC matches anything in the table. If it does it'll send it strait to the destination device bypassing the router. Communications generally only go to the router when either:

 

A. Packets are destined for another network

B. A particular application or protocol requires a default gateway.

 

SAMBA is responsible for handling SMB on Linux so if this is a SMB transfer then attempting to Link Aggregate the connection between the router & the switch would have realistically only increased your bandwidth access for your clients to the internet (if it were over 1Gbit) or another private network.

This is very true. 

 

*hides in a corner and cries silently*

[Windows7ge]

25 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

This is very true. 

 

*hides in a corner and cries silently*

*sigh*

*picks you up out of corner*

 

Experimenting is always a great way to learn more. Sometimes doing something spontaneous like this can produce something wonderful.

 

Besides I'm sure someone more intelligent than me will be along to tell me how wrong I am in every possible aspect.

 

*steals your corner and cries silently*

[Falconevo]

Unfortunately LACP requires client network interface and switch support.  The majority of 'smart' switches support it so you can get some cheap 1G switches that have LACP functionality.   Smart switches should also give you VLAN tagging support and possibly even some QoS which you can put to use in testing

 

It's good stuff to learn, but I would refrain from doing remote 'live' changes while learning We have all done it, I have made a change incorrectly when I was a lot younger and had to drive 80 miles to the site to fix it because I was in a rush.  I knew I was fucked the instant I pushed the config and lost SSH access to the device, with no out of bounds available or anyone on site with access to the comms room it was a 160 mile round trip haha.  Full on face palm moment, then panic.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I would imagine the correct way to do this would have been to bridge the LACP interface and the USB one.  So even if the LACP interface didn't work, you could still plug back into the USB one.  Hindsight and all.

 

You should be able to undo the LACP settings without completely reinstalling, you can change or just completely replace the configuration file /conf/config.xml from the console with your backup.

 

Went through a similar thing when I first got a 4 port ethernet card and wanted to bridge the LAN.  Its all about thinking logically about what order you need to do thing in to retain connectivity while you are changing things.  So easy to make a mistake by being impulsive or the router UI changing things in an order you didn't expect (had that on OpenWRT as I recall).

Unfortunately without the VGA cable you are SOL at this point, unless the motherboard has a serial port and you have a client with one.  (although not sure if pfSense enables the serial login by default or not)