What's new

Adding more NIC's pfsense

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

Fingers

Regular Contributor
I wish to replace a dual NIC and add a couple of quad NIC's to my pfsense custom build. I have done a back up. If I add these will it just ask me to configure WAN and LAN again due to the miss match, thus being able to continue with my exsisting config?
I want to avoid setting it up again as it has taken me ages to get just how I want it.

Thank you
 
I don't remember the order pfsense picks the NICs. Are you going to use a bunch of Laggs? Why so many ports?
 
A VLAN per NIC? You know you can run all the VLANs on the same NIC. Maybe a network per NIC? I don't think pfsense supports multiple networks per NICs.
 
Thanks for all the advice. Appologies if this is a dumb question, but I thought it may be better to run VLAN's on seperate NIC's. Is there no degredation in performance to running...say five or six VLAN's off one NIC?
 
No. You will end up with more bandwidth if you separate your VLANs.

To a certain point - for most SOHO/SMB scale networks, VLAN's do introduce a level of complexity that has little benefit...

pfSense can drive the VLAN bus, but it's preferred to use a Layer 3/Layer 3-Lite switch, letting pfSense handle the gateway/firewall stuff directly.

With multiple NIC's, or a single multi-port NIC, gigabit shouldn't be a problem in any case with newer Intel/AMD platforms - even an Atom based C2000 series can handle a gigabit WAN - good example recently from servethehome.com - and the numbers below are Atom E-series, the C-Series is better...

Protectli-FW4A-Performance.jpg


Getting back to one of the questions - Link Aggregation - it's not going to increase speed, but it does help with capacity - this goes back to ethernet primitives, in that one cannot split lanes at layer 2...

One can have 4 1Gbe lanes, but each lane has it's own state, so one can't send a layer 2 ack on lane 2 to an ethernet packet on lane 1 for example.
 
Similar threads
Thread starter Title Forum Replies Date
GHammer pfSense No More Without Paid Version? Routers 116

Similar threads

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top