VLANs and PFsense
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Layer 2 is working as I expect it to.
When I first encountered this problem (3 years ago) I had this Atom board.
The first router suddenly broke down and I replaced it with scrap hardware. That was running like its previous one.I tried to use the working config of this scrap router and couldn't get it to work on this atom-board with 2 Intel NICs.
I did notice it loads the first interfaces quite fast, pauses and then loads the other interfaces at a slower pace.I made a small test setup around that Atom-board and started experimenting.
Turning off vlan hardware tagging turned out to be the key to get that working.I then replaced the scrap router (layer 3 and working) with this Atom based system which worked with that same config (as long as I turn off hw vlan tagging).
It's working for 3 years that way. Replaced the router another time and sold the 2 Atom systems (one was a spare one).
Both these Atom systems work fine, but they only have 4 or 5 vlans.Never got an answer how hardware assisted vlan tagging could make a difference on my layer 2 setup….
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Perhaps your problem is being imported over and over with this config you keep re-using?
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Perhaps your problem is being imported over and over with this config you keep re-using?
Yes….
If I receive this Netgate motherboard and it doesn't work out of the box (with the imported config.xml) I will try to make a new setup.
In this setup I can of course replace the Netgear switch with another brand. -
Wow there has been a lot of back and forth since I left the message to look at the switch. First I never meant to say or imply that Netgear switches are not a worthy switch. I just wanted to bring to light that all switches have limitations in both the number of static VLANs they can create and also the number of Tagged VLANs that can have per port. I just wanted to do that bit of home work. If we think back to the basics when you add a tagged vlan to a port you are extending the size of the packet I think 4 Bytes but someone please correct me if I'm wrong here. At some point your equipment will not like the size of the packet and reject it but there are work arounds like reducing the payload size to accommodate the larger header information. Seems to me that you are getting close because if you connect a computer to your switch on a untagged port (No Vlan info in the header) everything is all good. You could try to do a packet capture of the interface and see what's going on at layer 2. You might be at the point in your network size where a multi-layer switch fabric and possible a multi layer routing network would give you better performance. When I first commented last night (I'm in the blizzard of 2015) there were only a few replies but now we are on page three so I don't remember if there was a diagram of your network. Can you please provide a diagram. I would really like to get to the bottom of your issue. Remember that this issue you are having can help many people out if we all just work together to solve it. Just as a side not and performance issue, with that many vlans you may want to think about using a layer-3 switch, I think you said you were using atom grade hardware so your routing performance is not going to be as good as a switch with custom asics doing the same job (Hell a i7 isn't going to do as good a job a layer-3 switch). Also how many users do you have on your LAN? When you have HWtagging on at what point are you seeing a failure (how may vlans).
Again I would like us all the remain civil I know it can get frustrating when we want to help but we are not getting the information that we want. This seems like a interesting issue.
I'm going to go on the record and say Netgear is not shit, there are tools for a job and sometimes the job gets so big you need another tool. Ebay is a great place to get enterprise grade gear really cheap. I got 2 48 port PoE gigabit Broacade Layer-3 switches with a 10GBps Interface (Not included) for $250. I have had the switch for about 6 months now no issues what so ever. before that I got a few HP-Procure 24 port Gigabit switches with a 48Gbps back plane for $200 bucks and went good for me until some caps exploded due to the temp of my commroom 2.5 years later. I replaced them which cost me $.75 and the switch is going strong today.
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Do my best to duplicate dude's setup with what gear I have on hand and all I get is, "that isn't good enough."
And still utter refusal to answer specific, pointed questions so I can duplicate his environment as closely as possible.
And, yes, the GS108 is shit. I have one. It's no longer on my network. And that's just my house.
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Test the entire config in a virtual environment.
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Has OP ever explained how he is tagging through 85 VLANs on a switch that
only supports 64? Looks like his does 128 and the GS724Tv4 does 256. The GS108T only does 64 through. But with careful application it should be doable as long as no more than 64 go out any "core" switchport.I finally got my stupid ProSafe utility running again. Had to spin up a new VM to do it. My GS108PE stops me from tagging VLANs on ports at 32. About to put it inline between pfSense and the 3550.
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I was unable to attempt to debug this because all I have is good switches…. Layer 8 getting to you again?
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I can't get it to fail with an re(4) even. Something in dude's environment must be wonky.
I'd examine /conf/config.xml to see if there's anything different about any of the VLANs or interface definitions.
pfSense (192.168.$vlan.3) <-> GS108PE <-> Cisco 3550 <-> 2 Cisco routers with 100 dot1q interfaces each. (192.168.$vlan.[12])
Seems to just work, with the expected limitation that I can only pass VLANs 2 - 32 through the netgear. 33-100 fail.
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There was no refusal to give specific info.
While I was answering one question 3 others came in and toldWhy oh why are you all so busy putting the blame on my Netgear 724Tv3.
First one says it only supports 64 vlans, then the next tells him how good he so quickly proved I was in error.
I checked the specs and according to specs it does 128 vlans and to be more thorough I added so many vlans that I hit that ceiling of 128 vlans…
While I'm testing this another 3 messages come in telling me what I'm also probably doing wrong...I am not in an ideal situation here. I'm on a small peninsula with almost 100 places I have to provide with Internet.
Before I came the cables were already in place and there were some soho routers at certain places.
I've used that same infrastructure using daisy-chained GS108T netgear switches.
1 building has several 108T switches directly connected to the GS724T and the 2nd building has a GS108T as well with many GS108T's behind it.
This network could have been much cleaner, but given the real world I live in, the amount of money I can spend it's a good network.
Furthermore it's a network that's not built from scratch.I have no reason at all to think there's something wrong with my layer-2 network besides you saying so.
I had a moment with 2 pfsenses. 1 working and 1 not working. The config.xml on the running pfsense was the same as the config.xml of the other. I only did a search/replace to change the realtek card into an Intel card (em0 and em1). I couldn't get the new pfsense system to work until I turned off "hardware vlan tagging". The one with the realtek cards and scrap hardware was working without any problem.If my layer-2 network is so wrong how in earth could turning off vlan hardware tagging fix that. Why don't you give me an answer to that question instead of attacking me like wolves only because I'm asking if you also know of some problem with the Intel NICs I'm using?
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If my layer-2 network is so wrong how in earth could turning off vlan hardware tagging fix that.
Because it cures an upstream problem of incorrect VLAN tag handling in the switch?
Don't worry, not only Netgear has its problems.
HP switches don't handle IGMPv2 properly in bigger IP-TV systems (approx. 1000 IP HD Cams). In a casino install there were HP switches for about $1M replaced by Cisco even after HP engineers had been on site and couldn't solve it. The system worked immediately with the Ciscos in place.Which version of GS108 switches do you use - there are quite some with very different capabilities!
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I have GS108T switches after the GS724T switches…
I had only GS108E and don't use that anymore.
The GS108T have an IP and can be managed without a utility...I have both NICs connected to the Netgear GS724Tv3 switch.
I have created 6 VLANs on NIC igb1 (10~15) and about 80 on NIC igb0.On igb1 I have a 10.250.250.1/25 and on igb0 it's 10.250.250.129/25
I don't think it's the best way to do it, but I'm using the 10.250.250.0/25 network to reach all the GS108T's through pfsense.On 10.250.250.10 I have the GS724T configured.
I send VLAN1 to the next building with about 50 VLANs (mostly the LAN interfaces, but also vlan14 which is a NAT adsl router/modem with VoIP server)
That first GS108T will have all these VLANs configured and sends VLAN1 to 2 GS108T's. 1 GS108T has a few vlans, the 2nd GS108T has many vlans and sends these to the next GS108TFrom that GS108T there are several GS108T's in series until it hits 1 GS108T which splits it into 2direction. From this moment on I've already reached a new building...
I have no drawing of this network and I just described only a part of it.Each vlan has a 10.0.x.0/24 interface to it.
If the vlan is 150 then it will get a 10.0.150.0/24 network.I haven't done this now, but 3 years ago when I was faced with this problem for the first time I only used only 1 GS108T on which I only extracted vlan100
In that test situation I was unable to ping my pfsense if I turned off vlan hardware tagging......
It's too complex to describe really,,,
I think it's best to have another go with new hardware.
This new hardware (a Netgate) is something I need anyway. Not to solve this problem (as I already have a solution for it). -
I have GS108T switches…
There are at least GS108Tv1 and GS108Tv2 versions available.
Do you run the latest firmware on all GS108T switches?The interconnect ports are configured as Trunk or as General Port
After reading the manual it seems as if those switches can't be configured with Trunk ports at all. You can only stack tagged PVIDs on a port.
Why would anyone want to massively trunk and daisy-chain them then? :-\Those switches do have VLAN issues which makes it suspicious for others:```
Known issues: Port PVID (Switching > VLAN > Advanced > Port PVID Configuration) does not automatically changed back to 1 after its associated VLAN is deleted.
Workaround: Manually change the PVID back to 1.
Limitations: Combined MAC and IP ACL do not work with double VLAN tagged traffic. -
Let's see a diagram. http://www.gliffy.com// as much detail as possible.
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I have these GS108T's
Several are attached to the GS724T and only 1 has to handle more than 40 VLANs
I don't use trunks.
I don't use ACL's
Only port-based vlansmodel: GS108Tv2
boot: B5.1.0.2
revision: 5.0.5.10The one involved in handling the fibre connection only has to deal with 7 VLANs and is an endpoint (2 WAN connections and 5 LAN-connections).
For the problem of having no IP-traffic going from the office network (vlan100) to the Pfsense there is no GS108T involved.
The GS724T switch and Pfsense are in the same office.
I have a normal switch attached to a port on the GS724T which has vlan100 untagged on it.The issue of having slow performing traffic does have a GS108T attached to the GS724T.
The funny thing there is that it also carries the vlan for a 6 Mbit ADSL-modem.
The GS108T sits in a house where both the 50 Mbit fibre switch is and that 6 Mbit ADSL-modem.
If I don't remove vlan hardware tagging I will have slow performance on the 50 Mbit connection (2~3 Mbit). That 6 Mbit connection is full speed all the time.When I was troubleshooting this performance problem I wasn't suspecting the Pfsense at all. My prime suspect was the ISP giving us the fibre connection.
I made an alias for all the WeTransfer IP networks (Amazon's).
I found out that if I direct the traffic to the 6 Mbit ADSL modem's gateway I would get full speed.
The default route to fibre gave me only 2 Mbit.
I then needed to test directly on the fibre switch. Because of bad weather I decided to check the speed with a laptop connected to the GS724T switch.
I was amazed to get that full speed.
Only as a long shot I tried to turn off that hardware tagging for the NIC that holds the WAN-interfaces.
I was again amazed to find out I can now have full speed on the fibre connection through Pfsense.I'm not saying it's definitely NOT the Netgear, but my prime suspect is still the NICs or the way they are interfacing with FreeBSD.
AFAIK I'm running Intel server NICs.
As a side note I once installed Windows SBS2011 on an Intel Desktop board.
I was only able to find drivers for desktop Windows operating systems.
I did some searching and it had to do with Intel having NICs with vlan issues that were used on Desktop boards.
For this reason there were no drivers for the server OS's
Patching the inf file of the server drivers to be able to use the desktop NICs was a solution (not an elegant one).
It wasn't my idea to buy a desktop board in the first place.I'm not using expensive Intel NICs, but they aren't cheap either.
It does give me an uneasy feeling about these Intel NICs.I just googled again and found this:
http://www.ivobeerens.nl/2012/08/08/enable-the-intel-82579v-nic-in-windows-server-2012/I haven't read this (just stumbled on it) and it mentions hardware vlan tagging:
http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/VLANI would really like to put it to rest until my Netgate motherboard is ordered and arrived.
I always thought my NICs just didn't properly support hardware assisted vlan tagging and the FreeBSD drivers were not capable of making a difference between those Intel NICs that do and those that don't.
Again… not substantiated...It's not that strange for hardware vendors to sell faulty chips and merely disable certain features.
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I hope this gets resolved with the new board.
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That's because if there was a VLAN HW TAGGING problem in FreeBSD everyone would already know about it, bro. Google it. It doesn't exist.
WE have to help YOU figure out what's wrong in YOUR network so we can help YOU unwrong it.
Googled:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=em%284%29&sektion=#end -
BUGS
Hardware-assisted VLAN processing is disabled by default. You can enable
it on an em interface using ifconfig(8).I'm not reading where that says its broken - just that the bug is that is comes disabled by default.
Of course, I've never gone in turning it on and off either… If the only bug you have is that it only works when Hardware-assist is on, then leave it off.
Does leaving it off give you a noticed performance hit? -
http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.firewalls.m0n0wall.devel/month=20091201
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Why the heck are you referring to some 2009 thread regarding m0n0wall/FreeBSD 6.4? Additionally involving Realtek NICs and Xen? ::) :o
Still could not be bothered with replacing the Netgears with another switch brand to do some basic debugging?
