Adding more NIC's pfsense

[Fingers]

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

 

[sfx2000]

back up your existing configuration - note the interface names...

shutdown, remove/replace the NIC

BSD should pick up the new interfaces when you start back up, but you may have to check/modify the interfaces.

Something similar to what you're trying to do...

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/48299/change-nic-s-without-rebuilding-pfsense/6

 

[coxhaus]

I don't remember the order pfsense picks the NICs. Are you going to use a bunch of Laggs? Why so many ports?

 

[sfx2000]

Are you going to use a bunch of Laggs? Why so many ports?

For most - not LAGG's - for many, it's VLAN's...

I know this is a sore spot for you, but there are folks that do this...

 

[coxhaus]

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.

 

[Fingers]

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?

 

[coxhaus]

No. You will end up with more bandwidth if you separate your VLANs.

 

[Fingers]

Ok Thank you.

 

[sfx2000]

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...

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.