Bridge lan connections

[aGeekhere]

Hi

I have 3 Ports on my router (WAN, LAN, OPT1) I want to bridge LAN and OPT1 together to increase LAN bandwidth to the router.

I have been following this Guide http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-pfsense-configure-network-interface-as-a-bridge-network-switch/

The question is how do I test if it worked? In the traffic graphs I do see LAN traffic flowing in both LAN and OPT1.

Is it safe to assume that it is working? Are they any other tests I can perform?

Thanks

[doktornotor]

@aGeekHere:

I have 3 Ports on my router (WAN, LAN, OPT1) I want to bridge LAN and OPT1 together to increase LAN bandwidth to the router.

That is NOT bridge, that'd be a LAGG (plus adequate switch required). Not to mention, you seem to have some strange idea how the traffic flows. LAN -> LAN traffic does not normally hit the router at all.

[aGeekhere]

Hi let me try to re-explain,
My setup is I have a pfsense router with 3 gigabit Ethernet ports, they are WAN, LAN and OPT1.
The WAN connection goes to the modem and the LAN connection goes to the Gigabit switch (OPT1 is free atm).

I have squid cache running on the pfsense router. When I said I wanted to bridge (maybe the correct term here is NIC teaming or bonding) LAN and OPT1 together to increase LAN bandwidth I meant the transfer speed from the squid cache to the LAN network so if there are multiple computers pulling data from the squid cache (say a large windows update or video file) and exceeding the 1 gigabit speed limit that it would use the speed from the OPT1 connection as well.

So both the LAN and OPT1 would go to the same gigabit switch thus creating a dual gigabit connection to the pfsense router (which is my goal).

It would be like having a server which has 2 Ethernet slots, both which are plugged together on the same switch in bridge mode. If 10 computers are pulling data from the server having the 2 Ethernet ports in bridge mode would increase the LAN bandwidth for the other computers from the server.

Thanks for the help

[doktornotor]

No, once again, that would not work. Bridge does NOT aggregate bandwidth.

[aGeekhere]

Does pfsense support aggregate bandwidth?

[doktornotor]

Already told you that you need LAGG with proper switch.

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/LAGG_Interfaces

[aGeekhere]

Ok thanks going to see if it will work with my hardware

[aGeekhere]

I am having a little trouble with migrating LAN to LAGG (with LAGG I am temporary using failover mode in a view to use lacp) https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Migrate_Assigned_LAN_to_LAGG
When it comes to the step where “Navigate to Interfaces > (assign), change the assignment of LAN to the newly created LAGG interface (LAGG0)” (so it would look like this under Interfaces: Assign network ports Interface = LAN, Network port = LAGG0) after this step is done I lose network connection and have to Restore recent configuration from the serial connection.
Any ideas?

[jahonix]

Did you really add only the third, spare interface to LAGG, test function with appropriate configured switch and add second IF after that?

@https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Migrate_Assigned_LAN_to_LAGG:

Create a new LAGG including only the second NIC

[aGeekhere]

Hi, It looks like my gigabit switch does not support link aggregation, might have to try later when I get a new switch that supports this feature.

Thanks for the help

[added]

Thinking maybe the TP-LINK TL-SG108E?

[jahonix]

I don't know that one but have worked with TL-SG3210 successfully in the past.