CRS and LACP

RouterOS General
1

Hi!

I’ve got my CRS today and want to replace my RB and my HP Switch with just one device.
I use 3 ISPs.
So I configured 3 Ports for those ISPs, a 4th as LAN (with the local IP) and made all other ports slaves of this port (so LAN is master).
Is this the way this is usually done?

Now my problem: I have a FreeNAS that supports link aggreagtion using LACP. This worked flawlessly with the HP switch. But how do I configure this with the CRS?
As I understand I have to add the 2 Ports the FreeNAS is connected to as a bonded port, something like:
0 name=“Data” mtu=1500 mac-address=4C:5E:0C:93:F1:4A arp=enabled slaves=ether23,ether24 mode=802.3ad primary=none link-monitoring=mii arp-interval=100ms
arp-ip-targets=“” mii-interval=100ms down-delay=0ms up-delay=0ms lacp-rate=30secs transmit-hash-policy=layer-2


BUT: if I configure ports23 and 24 to this bonding, I can’t make them slave of LAN port, so these ports become isolated.
I won’t have to make a bridge or something, do I?

Regeards

Patrick

2

I don’t know exactly about freeNAS, but this works with CRS switch hardware support and my Thecus.
On the CRS use trunking on the switch chip (this is balance-xor, 802.3ad is not available yet):

/interface ethernet switch trunk
add member-ports=ether23,ether24 name=trunk-NAS

On the NAS side, use balance-xor as the agregation type (if available).

3

Thank you. Do you / does anybody know, if any of those options (and if so, which one :slight_smile: ) corresponds to balance-xor?

Failover
FEC (Fast Ether Channel)
LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol)
Load Balancing
Roundrobin

(if any, one of the last two, I’d say…)
Normally I’d just try, but I remember changing link aggregation on FreeNAS to be quite a … thing.

4

Ok. Tried it on my NAS. Load Balancing instead of balance-xor works ok as well (i dare to say even better). Probably round robin would also do.

5

Hm, I tried both options, didn’t really work. I just gave up trunking for now… even with the HP switch performance probably wasn’t really better…

6

You are right, performance is actually the same. In my case the bottleneck is the NAS CPU which limits traffic at about 45 MB.sec, which fits well into a Gigabit connection. Just set up bonding for the fun of it…

7

Yes, one wants to keep himself informed, doesn’t he? Actually binding would make sense in my case as I’m easily able to saturate one link. As it’s not only a NAS but a ‘real’ PC with i3 processor.
What I’ve done now is I just gave the other NIC another IP address and will be doing the automatic backups to one IP and the rest of the data connections to the other IP…