ASUS RT-N56U slow stream in LAN

[IngoVals]

I know the Asus is a wireless router but this problem is happening in the wired part.

I have a NAS box (Seagate BlackArmor 400) which I stream from to my Raspberry Pi setup with Xbian XBMC. This all works quite well.

Problem was I had the router and NAS in my living room while the fiber optic cable modem comes into my garage on the floor below. I had bad wireless signal there where I had a dedicated computer room.

I decided I would buy a new and better router (the other was a BEWAN vox supplied by my ISP) and move the NAS box down while utilizing my cat cable to connect my Pi (which I'm planning to upgrade to a BRIX).

I bought a Asus RT - N56U as my router, kept the BEWAN as a switch + wireless access point upstairs.

Everything is looking great, my PS4 on the lower floor gets much better reception through wireless.

Problem starts when I'm streaming a 1080p movie to XBMC, a movie that worked fine before. Suddenly it has to buffer each 1 or 2 minutes. It's like the new router is worse than the other one. I tried turning of QoS I hadn't set up properly anyways and also bypass the BEWAN completely but no dice.

I'm hoping this is just a configuration problem because the new one of course has more options but I do not know what I should be looking for.

One other thing I can thing of that is connected differently is the NAS box which has 2 LAN ports. I tried connecting to them both now with the idea to utilize one as the ip I stream from and the other as the ip I upload into the NAS box

However in the router GUI client list it appears both times with same IP (separate MAC) but I'm guessing this is just a presentation issue because both have the same name and both ips work from browser.

Does anyone have a clue what the problem could be? Is my new router worse then the ISP provided one?

Is there something I could be configuring wrong?

I still have the older router and could try some comparison tests if there are any snooping tools you could recommend for me as well.

I found this on the XBMC forums where someone had the same problem with a BlackArmor + RT-N56U

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=105207&pid=838767#pid838767

Is this router just good for wireless perhaps?

EDIT

Just found this

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=5693

I'm going to try this and see if it makes a difference.

 

[IngoVals]

Adding a switch between the router and the NAS box seems to do the trick. Weird isn't.

 

[azazel1024]

I am suprised it is working at all, or with a switch in the way. The issue is, you cannot connect both LAN ports at the same time, UNLESS you have a networking device that support link aggregation or you are setting up spanning tree or you have them on seperate networks.

Unplug the 2nd LAN port on the NAS.

Only reason it is maybe working okay now is the switch (I assume a dumb switch) probably has some kind of in-built spanning tree support or something similar.

Connecting two LAN ports without LAG support on both ends sets up a loop, which tends to cause nasty network problems.

 

[htismaqe]

Because one end of the connection was a NAS, it probably didn't see it as a loop.

Rather, I imagine the NAS was trying to use both links while the switch in the Asus was only recognizing the MAC address of the NAS for one of the links. So you had asymmetric forwarding going on, which would cause slowness but not a complete failure.

 

[IngoVals]

I am suprised it is working at all, or with a switch in the way. The issue is, you cannot connect both LAN ports at the same time, UNLESS you have a networking device that support link aggregation or you are setting up spanning tree or you have them on seperate networks.

Unplug the 2nd LAN port on the NAS.

Only reason it is maybe working okay now is the switch (I assume a dumb switch) probably has some kind of in-built spanning tree support or something similar.

Connecting two LAN ports without LAG support on both ends sets up a loop, which tends to cause nasty network problems.

The NAS drive does support it as either link aggregation or failover (whatever that means). Thing is each lan port gets it's own IP address, so if I NFS connect to to one address I should be using that one only right?

I was always just using one and a SMB system for connecting. This used the hostname and not a ip address. I tried disconnecting one lan port and SMB suddenly didn't work anymore. Might have had to disconnect the other one instead.

This is what it says in the manual

The server’s two LAN ports can be configured for link aggregation, which means you can
connect both LAN ports to your network at the same time for failover protection: the other link
(port) takes over if one link fails. See page 38.
Alternatively, you can use one LAN port to connect to your network and the other LAN port to
set up archive backup, where an exact copy of the data on your BlackArmor server is created
and maintained on a second BlackArmor server. See page 37.

So I guess you are right, that I should only use both if I plan to do a link aggregation. As the NAS box supports this is still something needed of the router?

I think this is the switch that I used
ZyXel ES-105A or something similar.

 

[azazel1024]

You need a managed or semi-managed switch that supports link aggregation. This is something you must set on the switch, not something it auto-detects.

As for asymetrical forwarding, that sounds about right as to why it worked, but worked very poorly and also why likely no loop was actually setup.

You could set it in to fail over mode, probably. You cannot use link aggregation unless the networking device you are connected to supports it.

If connected directly to a switch, the switch must support it. If connected directly to a router, the router must support it. You do not need the entire networking chain to support link aggregation (IE if it is NAS->switch->router), however, if setup as I showed parenthetically, the connection between the switch and the router is only capable of 1Gbps. If everything was setup in LAG mode with two ports connected, you could have 2x1Gbps of throughput between all parts of your network.

My two switches have LAG setup and 2 ports connected between each other. That allows 2x1Gbps of traffic to pass between the switches (any single network transfer is limited to 1Gbps, but 2 or more connections could conceivably push 2Gbps of total bandwidth, but each individual connection is still limited to no more than 1Gbps).

This is what LAG is for. It is for link redundancy (in case one goes down, the others are still working) and also for increasing agreggate bandwidth, by having more than one link capable of accepting traffic, but it can't use the links together as multiple channels for a single source of traffic (Multichannel can, but that is, as far as I know, limited to some "test" stuff and isn't main stream, and SMB Multichannel, which is a Windows 8/8.1 and Server 2012 only thing right now).