FTTH (AON): Fritz!Box 5530 works, pfSense not

waldy327

@keyser
Ok, thank your for your explanation.

First of all, this could be true

I think your assumption about the link being good is wrong.
if you mean the layer 2. The physical connection must work in my opinion.

I now checked the VLAN configuration, does not work, too. So, I really wouldn't exclude that there must be something special configured on layer2, because in every configuration - also doing port mirroring on the switch port - I couldn't see any packets incoming (only some own 362 tagged stuff) which looks really weird for me.

But...how will MacSEC work? I never told my ISP the MAC address of the Fritz!Box. It is my own box. Or are the MacSEC keys exchanged dynamically? Then, I could test it on a linux system which seems to support the MacSEC protocol... :-)

stephenw10

How exactly was the mirror setup? There must have been reply packets of some sort if it successfully pulls an IP address.

Steve

waldy327

@stephenw10
hmm...I configured the port of my laptop as the destination port and the SFP port as source port and activated egress and ingress mirroring. Or is that wrong? ;-)

stephenw10

Well what I would try to do is put the switch in between the incoming connection and a device that successfully connects. Then mirror one of the ports to another port and capture on that.

There must be two way traffic so it has to be captured by doing that.

Steve

keyser

@waldy327 said in FTTH (AON): Fritz!Box 5530 works, pfSense not:

But...how will MacSEC work? I never told my ISP the MAC address of the Fritz!Box. It is my own box. Or are the MacSEC keys exchanged dynamically? Then, I could test it on a linux system which seems to support the MacSEC protocol... :-)

If it’s your own box (bought it yourself), it’s not MacSEC. To use MacSEC the box needs either a provisioned CA/Key or to be setup for MacSEC via 802.1x port auth. You would know if you had to do either when you bought the box.

waldy327

Hey,
my media converter arrived today! Tried it directly on my ISP's fiber and it worked with my laptop. I could see HSRP packets (from a tagged vlan 302) like on the Fritz!Box's WAN port. :-)

On the one hand that makes me really happy as it means there must be in general no technical problem to connect an own SFP module to the fiber line. So, simple Ethernet...yeah!

But ...where is the difference between the simple media converter and my switch (or the pfSense)? What do I have to configure that both work nearly on the same way? In my opinion every layer3 or layer2 device can be configured as a dumb layer1 device. ;-)

stephenw10

Hmm, so not even a VLAN required on the client at all?

waldy327

@stephenw10
Yes and no. The VLAN id 362 is required for the normal communication and getting an IP via DHCP. But on the underlying interface I can see that multicast traffic from other VLANs.

keyser

@waldy327 said in FTTH (AON): Fritz!Box 5530 works, pfSense not:

Hey,
my media converter arrived today! Tried it directly on my ISP's fiber and it worked with my laptop. I could see HSRP packets (from a tagged vlan 302) like on the Fritz!Box's WAN port. :-)

On the one hand that makes me really happy as it means there must be in general no technical problem to connect an own SFP module to the fiber line. So, simple Ethernet...yeah!

But ...where is the difference between the simple media converter and my switch (or the pfSense)? What do I have to configure that both work nearly on the same way? In my opinion every layer3 or layer2 device can be configured as a dumb layer1 device. ;-)

Okay - Then we must be looking at something wrong with the underlying link - just not “link” pr. se, but rather that your SFP does not work (send/recieve) even though it seems to, and shows link. Since you are unable to see any frames recieved on the Switchport or pfSenes packet capture, it must be because the SFP does not work with your switch/pfSense device.

stephenw10

Ok so, to be clear, you were setting VLAN362 on your laptop directly to get a connection?

Can you test pfSense via the media converter?

You might try disabling hardware VLAN offloading on the ix SPF NIC. Though I wouldn't expect an issue with that.

Steve

waldy327

I now connected the pfSense to the media converter and I am totally confused. It works with perfect! Ok, nearly as I think the media converter has maybe little bandwidth problems with single streams, but for testing it is oK. Maybe, it also could be the wrong time for speed testing. ;-)

What I do not understand:
1.) If it would be an issue with the SFP compatibility on my switch/pfSense device, I would expect that the SFP modules would not work on the LAN side, too. But between two switches and between the pfSense box the SFP modules works fine.

2.) The media converter is a TP-Link one, the switch also. So, shouldn't be a problem?

3.) @stephenw10 How can I disable hardware VLAN offloading in the pfSense? Is there a kernel parameter?
Or is it enough to disable
"Hardware TCP Segmentation Offloading"
"Hardware Large Receive Offloading"
?

However, the igb0 adapter looks like this:

igb0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	description: OPT3
	options=e120bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>

And the ix0 adapter like I have posted above. Or do I have to disable the VLAN_HWTSO capability explicitly?

ix0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
...
options=e138bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
	capabilities=f53fbb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,VLAN_HWTSO,NETMAP,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>

Insofar I don't see any difference with hardware based VLAN options.

keyser

@waldy327 said in FTTH (AON): Fritz!Box 5530 works, pfSense not:

I now connected the pfSense to the media converter and I am totally confused. It works with perfect! Ok, nearly as I think the media converter has maybe little bandwidth problems with single streams, but for testing it is oK. Maybe, it also could be the wrong time for speed testing. ;-)

What I do not understand:
1.) If it would be an issue with the SFP compatibility on my switch/pfSense device, I would expect that the SFP modules would not work on the LAN side, too. But between two switches and between the pfSense box the SFP modules works fine.

2.) The media converter is a TP-Link one, the switch also. So, shouldn't be a problem?

3.) @stephenw10 How can I disable hardware VLAN offloading in the pfSense? Is there a kernel parameter?
Or is it enough to disable
"Hardware TCP Segmentation Offloading"
"Hardware Large Receive Offloading"
?

However, the igb0 adapter looks like this:
igb0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	description: OPT3
	options=e120bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
And the ix0 adapter like I have posted above. Or do I have to disable the VLAN_HWTSO capability explicitly?
ix0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
...
options=e138bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
	capabilities=f53fbb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,VLAN_HWTSO,NETMAP,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
Insofar I don't see any difference with hardware based VLAN options.

Good point about the SFP working in the LAN interface…
Perhaps it’s the ix interfaces that are not happy with the SFP, but the IGb is?

waldy327

Perhaps it’s the ix interfaces that are not happy with the SFP, but the IGb is?

No. I don't think so.
My igb* interfaces are all RJ45 based. ;-)
Only the two ix* interfaces are SFP/SFP+ based (Intel X552 onboard NICs).

stephenw10

@waldy327 said in FTTH (AON): Fritz!Box 5530 works, pfSense not:

Or is it enough to disable
"Hardware TCP Segmentation Offloading"
"Hardware Large Receive Offloading"

Those should be disabled anyway, they are disabled by default so definitely disabled them if you have set them enabled.

Hardware offloading requires the driver and hardware to work correctly together. Something that works on an igb NIC might work on ix. It might not even work on a different NIC that also uses the igb driver.
They usually do though because those Intels are the best supported. Intel contributes their own driver code to FreeBSD.

To disable that as a test you can run at the command line:

ifconfig ix0 -vlanhwfilter -vlanmtu -vlanhwtag -vlanhwcsum

I had assumed your igb NICs are not SFP?

Steve