Switching network to run over 2 interfaces
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The hardware PFSense is on has a spare ethernet port I was considering using this for the network for my home office. Currently, a switch in my office is ran through another switch, I believe this is causing my upload speed to be limited to something like 8-10 mb.
So my thought process is that connecting the switch in my office directly to the spare interface will hopefully get me a bit better throughput. I have 1 GB Up/down connection speed at the gateway. Want to eventually setup 10 GB LAN, but that's for later.
This leads to my questions:
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Does this make sense? To me, it seems like the switch into a switch is a big bottleneck point since these swtiches are several years old now and not 10 GB.
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I know I would add the interface in the interface menu and I think I would need a new subnet for this. Is this correct?
LAN Current interface is: 192.168.10 /24
OFFICE_LAN New interface: 192.168.11 /24 ?
From there, I would setup a DHCP server on .11 and remove my static IPs for the devices in my office from .10 and add to .11 -
What would I need to do to allow devices on .10 and .11 to talk to each other?
VLANs are coming next but I want to figure this out first.
Please let me know if this is all correct or where I'm going wrong. Both .10 and .11 would still use the same gateway out.
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@vashinator Are you saying less than 10 Mbit on a 1Gig connection?
Switches generally don't create bottlenecks, unless they are actively throttling (on a managed switch). And switches connected to switches shouldn't be a problem either...What make and model are those switches that you have? If your network, including the internet connection is 1G, there must be something else limiting you...
What speeds are you seeing when connected directly to the pfsense LAN port?
Have you checked other ports and cables to eliminate some hw fault? -
@vashinator said in Switching network to run over 2 interfaces:
Currently, a switch in my office is ran through another switch, I believe this is causing my upload speed to be limited to something like 8-10 mb.
Bad cable perhaps?
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@Gblenn
Main PC is getting around 100 md down, 10 mb up. Gateway itself shows 1 GB down and up. So it's definitely a LAN thing.
First one is a Unifi Switch 8, which is managed. Going to see if I can get into that but looks like cloud key for it got powered off at some point. So will have to reset. Will see if that is the culprit. Heck, I may have a spare unmanaged switch to try instead.
Second one is a TP-Link TL-SG116Previously I didn't have as much speed. So it's possible I set the managed switch up in a weird way. But I may see about swapping it out, not sure I even necessarily need the managed switch in my setup. But will check out the Unifi.
My thought process was that an entire switch would be running through one switch prot on the unifi switch and thought that may be a bottleneck.
@JKnott will check out the cables too.
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@vashinator What internet speed do you have, as per your contract? The fact that the gateway is showing 1G simply means that the HW has negotiated that connection. It doesn't mean you actually have 1G as your internet speed, you could even have 100/10...
To test the performance on your LAN, you could try iperf, and test between two PC's...
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@Gblenn contract is 940 MB. So I'm pretty sure the 1G up and down is accurate. It may be Mb I am forgetting for sure.
It's a 1 Gig Fiber connection. So showing 1025 MB up and 1040 down seems fairly reasonable.
I did try to replace the switch and I'm still seeing an issue. Going to replace a cable and see if that helps.
And yeah, I'll do some iperf tests this weekend to check connection via the LAN.
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I got it figured out. I don't recall setting up traffic shaper, but somehow they were limited to be pretty low. Maybe I set it up previously when I had a 100/10 speed. I may just turn it off entirely and see how it goes.
Thank you both for your help! I'm glad I asked before diving into setting up the second interface.
