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Bort · 12-01-2021, 01:40

Yesterday my Hub4 finally received the new firmware update which makes the port-aggregation work consistently and so I set it up and thought I'd share how I did it as I'm not using Mikrotik equipment instead I'm using just my normal pfSense router connected directly to the Hub4 (which is in modem mode).

So first of all within pfSense you can setup a round-robin LAGG from the Interfaces -> LAGGs menu (<RouterIP>/interfaces_lagg.php).

Obviously to use this you'll need multiple ethernet ports on your pfSense box to connect directly to the modem. You can use switches for this but I'm specifically detailing how to do this with just pfSense.

So my setup is 1 x 10Gb connection between my pfSense system and my home network (my entire home network is 10Gb wired).

Then for the Hub4 connection I used 4 x 1Gb ethernet. Now this is important because when I used only 2 x 1Gb connections I couldn't obtain more than 980 Mbps no matter what I did. So this was a 40 Mb improvement over using a single cable but not the 1.15-1.20 Gbps I was hoping for.

After a lot of trial and error I decided to connect 4 x 1Gb connections just as a test and instantly I was getting peak speeds of 1.22 Gbps within the pfSense interface and 1.15 Gbps to 1.20 Gbps in various speed tests that I conducted.

Here are some screenshots of those speeds:
Inside pfSense Directly:

Speedtest.net Result:

(You may notice in the above screenshot it shows the ISP as Datacamp Limited and not Virgin Media that's because the above test result is actually over an OpenVPN connection and not conducted directly.)

I did also do a plain DSLreports test over the raw connection without the VPN active and it hit 1140 Mbps which resulted in the test halting and them displaying me this message:

Which I found rather humorous.

So that's all there is to it really, setup your LAGG as Round Robin, select all the interfaces you intend to connect to your modem (I recommend four due to what I said above regarding performance) hit save, specify that new LAGG Interface as your WAN on pfSense and you're off to the races.

Since I cloned the MAC address from my normal interface to the LAGG (this can all be done in the pfSense Interface GUI) I was able to get the connection up and running without even rebooting my modem. If you're using a different MAC to the normal one you will need to restart the modem.

One last thing to note. Round Robin LAGG setups can be quite CPU intensive due to the packets arriving out of order requiring the CPU to reorder them and when you're dealing with a 1.15-1.20 Gbps data flow.. that's a lot of packets to potentially receive out of order.

I noticed my pfSense router which is equipped with a 3.3GHz Core i5 Quad Core from 2014 was reaching 30% to 50% CPU usage when maxing the connection out when usually it's around 5%. I did not experience any packet loss though which is excellent.

I bring this up as you may need a decent processor if you're doing this in pfSense and in my case I may even need to upgrade the CPU cooler I'm using as it got rather toasty when running a sustained 60GB file transfer test handling a heavier load than it usually does.

12-01-2021, 01:40	#108
Bort cf.member Join Date: Nov 2020 Posts: 5	Re: 1gig Rollout getting faster Yesterday my Hub4 finally received the new firmware update which makes the port-aggregation work consistently and so I set it up and thought I'd share how I did it as I'm not using Mikrotik equipment instead I'm using just my normal pfSense router connected directly to the Hub4 (which is in modem mode). So first of all within pfSense you can setup a round-robin LAGG from the Interfaces -> LAGGs menu (<RouterIP>/interfaces_lagg.php). Obviously to use this you'll need multiple ethernet ports on your pfSense box to connect directly to the modem. You can use switches for this but I'm specifically detailing how to do this with just pfSense. So my setup is 1 x 10Gb connection between my pfSense system and my home network (my entire home network is 10Gb wired). Then for the Hub4 connection I used 4 x 1Gb ethernet. Now this is important because when I used only 2 x 1Gb connections I couldn't obtain more than 980 Mbps no matter what I did. So this was a 40 Mb improvement over using a single cable but not the 1.15-1.20 Gbps I was hoping for. After a lot of trial and error I decided to connect 4 x 1Gb connections just as a test and instantly I was getting peak speeds of 1.22 Gbps within the pfSense interface and 1.15 Gbps to 1.20 Gbps in various speed tests that I conducted. Here are some screenshots of those speeds: Inside pfSense Directly: Speedtest.net Result: (You may notice in the above screenshot it shows the ISP as Datacamp Limited and not Virgin Media that's because the above test result is actually over an OpenVPN connection and not conducted directly.) I did also do a plain DSLreports test over the raw connection without the VPN active and it hit 1140 Mbps which resulted in the test halting and them displaying me this message: Which I found rather humorous. So that's all there is to it really, setup your LAGG as Round Robin, select all the interfaces you intend to connect to your modem (I recommend four due to what I said above regarding performance) hit save, specify that new LAGG Interface as your WAN on pfSense and you're off to the races. Since I cloned the MAC address from my normal interface to the LAGG (this can all be done in the pfSense Interface GUI) I was able to get the connection up and running without even rebooting my modem. If you're using a different MAC to the normal one you will need to restart the modem. One last thing to note. Round Robin LAGG setups can be quite CPU intensive due to the packets arriving out of order requiring the CPU to reorder them and when you're dealing with a 1.15-1.20 Gbps data flow.. that's a lot of packets to potentially receive out of order. I noticed my pfSense router which is equipped with a 3.3GHz Core i5 Quad Core from 2014 was reaching 30% to 50% CPU usage when maxing the connection out when usually it's around 5%. I did not experience any packet loss though which is excellent. I bring this up as you may need a decent processor if you're doing this in pfSense and in my case I may even need to upgrade the CPU cooler I'm using as it got rather toasty when running a sustained 60GB file transfer test handling a heavier load than it usually does.