LAGG with one switch?
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Hello, you'll have to forgive my limited networking knowledge. I have a pfsense box that I use as my main router. It has 1 nic for WAN and then an additional 4 ports for whatever. Right now I just have a single WAN and LAN interface, my thought was to setup LAGG with the other interfaces to utilize the other network cards. However, when I try to set it up, it doesn't work. Basically I have 4 nics all running into the same switch, all on 192.168.0.0/24, is there any way to make this work with LAGG, or any other method to balance the traffic across all the interfaces even though they're all running into a single switch?
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so how many clients do you have? What is your internet speed? Clearly its no more than the 1 interface you have for wan.. Is that gig and your lan side is only 100?
What do you expect to get out of using lagg? You want failover protection if 1 port dies? Do you have a smart switch that supports etherchannel/lagg ?
Even networking people seem to have a lack of understanding when it comes to lagg.. It does not get you 1+1=2 speed boost..
What is your use case? Do you have multiple segments/vlans on your lan side? You just don't like the interfaces sitting there empty?
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That's probably a good portion of my problem, I can't even say I really understand what LAGG is, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. Yes, essentially I just don't like having the empty ports there. Ideally I would like to use something to balance traffic across all the interfaces. I generally have about 30-40 clients on my home network. I do not believe I have a smart switch, it's a 48 port unmanaged SMC gigabit switch. My internet speed is comcast's extreme 105. My WAN and LAN interfaces are all gig interfaces. I do not have multiple segments.
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if you have only 1 segment traffic between clients on that segment don't even go to pfsense. So since your internet connection, ie your wan is only 105, and your connection to pfsense is gig. What would be the point of moving traffic over multiple interfaces when your not even coming close to the current bandwidth of lan side interface?
to do lag or etherchannel and do any sort of loadbalancing across the segments you would need smart switch that supports that feature.
If you do not like the ports just sitting there, then why don't you segment your network out? But your either going to need another switch or smart switch to do so.
In your current configuration you have no use for more than 1 lan side port, and have no way to even leverage them without a smart switch or multiple switches. If you don't like the idle ports then take it out and put in a single nic and put that 4 port nic in something you can use it on or sell it, etc.
What do you use for wifi? If you have AP you could connect it to one of those idle ports and put wifi on its own network, etc.
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OK, thanks for the reply. I guess the hope in using multiple nics would not really be for outbound traffic, but traffic between devices on my network. However, it sounds like I will need a smart switch to do that, so it looks like I will be abandoning this for now. Thanks again.
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OK, thanks for the reply. I guess the hope in using multiple nics would not really be for outbound traffic, but traffic between devices on my network.
Traffic between devices on your network doesn't touch the firewall at all (absent VLANs, but you have an unmanaged switch, so that won't be the case).
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Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks for your time.
