SOLVED How can I correctly configure my freeNAS to be available to my network via a simple switch?

[FredHansen]

Hello there!
My freeNAS is connected to the network via a wifi repeater (unfortunately this is the only LAN-Network access I have because I have physical (/digital) access to the router). It can be addressed with the standard domain (freenas.local) from inside the network. It has only 1 network adapter (1000mbit). My main workstation is connected to the same network via wifi, so the communication route between my PC and the NAS is like NAS-CABLE-REPEATER-WIFI-ROUTER-WIFI-PC, which results in maximum connection speeds of around 200mbits which is simply not enough for large data transmission like terabytes of backups.

My idea was to take a simple network switch (I don't think it supports LACP), connect the repeater, the NAS and my workstation to it, so I can directly communicate from my workstation with the NAS using the Switch and also use the NAS from other devices normally.

Unfortunately I don't know how to configure the NAS to work with the switch. I've tried to configure a VLAN from my NAS to solve the issue, but unfortunately I'm clearly no expert and I don't even know how I can configure the NAS so it's addressable with freenas.local from the network again, so I'm stuck with "The web interface could not be accessed.".

It would really appreciate it if someone could give me tips or a short tutorial on how to set this up or has a workaround (connect the NAS to the workstation and forward it to the network? Get a USB-network-adapter and connect the workstation with a cross-cable?)

Thank you all very much!
Fred

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Switch into router.
Workstation and NAS into switch.

No need for VLAN or anything, should just work.

Or if the point is to have a direct connection between workstation and NAS but you still have WiFi distance to your router:

Repeater into switch.
NAS into switch.
Workstation into switch.

Again, nothing to configure. Just power up the repeater and the switch before any of the two computers.

 

[FredHansen]

Switch into router.
Workstation and NAS into switch.

No need for VLAN or anything, should just work.

Or if the point is to have a direct connection between workstation and NAS but you still have WiFi distance to your router:

Repeater into switch.
NAS into switch.
Workstation into switch.

Again, nothing to configure. Just power up the repeater and the switch before any of the two computers.

Hi! Unfortunately, it doesn't work, that's what I tried in the first place (repeater to switch to NAS and workstation). I know the cable is alright each between the NAS and the switch and the switch and the repeater. I always get the error message "The web interface could not be accessed." for any or better unkown reasons.

 

[Samuel Tai]

The problem may be the limits of the repeater. It may only support a single MAC address, that of the FreeNAS server. In your case, you're trying to make the repeater support 2 MACs, the server and your workstation. Can you provide the models of the repeater and the router?

If I understand your original post, your network looks like this:

And you tried to reconfigure it like this:

This can work, provided all the pieces are capable; in particular, you'll need to have the Wi-Fi repeater act as a layer 2 bridge between the Ethernet and the Wi-Fi sides. No VLANs are needed in this scenario. You'll want to disable the Wi-Fi interface on the workstation; otherwise, you'll end up with layer 2 loops, which will prevent communications between your server and workstation. Remember to re-IP the workstation's Ethernet interface to be on the same subnet as the Wi-Fi interface.

 

[FredHansen]

The problem may be the limits of the repeater. It may only support a single MAC address, that of the FreeNAS server. In your case, you're trying to make the repeater support 2 MACs, the server and your workstation. Can you provide the models of the repeater and the router?

If I understand your original post, your network looks like this:

View attachment 40797

And you tried to reconfigure it like this:

View attachment 40799

This can work, provided all the pieces are capable; in particular, you'll need to have the Wi-Fi repeater act as a layer 2 bridge between the Ethernet and the Wi-Fi sides. No VLANs are needed in this scenario. You'll want to disable the Wi-Fi interface on the workstation; otherwise, you'll end up with layer 2 loops, which will prevent communications between your server and workstation. Remember to re-IP the workstation's Ethernet interface to be on the same subnet as the Wi-Fi interface.

The router is a FRITZ!Box which I don't know the exact model of, the repeater is a FRITZ!WLAN Repeater 1750E.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Most FRITZ!Box routers have 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports. Just wire your server and workstation directly to the router, and disable the Wi-Fi interface on the workstation. You can dispense with the WLAN repeater. Alternatively, connect both the server and workstation to the switch, and then the switch to the router.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The Fritz WLAN repeaters can do "Mesh" either via WiFi only or connected to the Fritzbox via Ethernet. They won't serve as a WiFi bridge for wired clients to the Fritzbox WiFi mesh.

So if the hardware is given, you need to run a wire from your Fritzbox to your switch. You can then, if the locations permit that, connect the repeater with a wire to the switch which will improve your wireless performance by quite a bit.

HTH,
Patrick

 

[FredHansen]

Okay, but is there any solution on how to get a fast LAN connection from the NAS to the workstation parallel to the slow one via WIFI without having access to the router?

So far I connected the NAS to the switch which is connected to the repeater and the workstation as suggested above having no physical access to the router. So far it works via WIFI, but there seems to be no speed benefit but even a slightly decreased speed than before, probably because the switch itself bottlenecks the overhead connection between switch, repeater, router, repeater and switch even more.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Could you just for a test plug both your workstation and the NAS into your Fritzbox? That should tell you the maximum performance you can reach provided you configure the Fritzbox' ports for "power" mode and not "green" mode.

Then you could plug the switch into your Fritzbox and both computers into your switch. If the switch is gigabit the speed should be exactly the same as before.

Then remove the connection between Fritzbox and switch and replace it with the repeater. Again the speed should remain the same.
Possibly you need to disable the WiFi on your workstation!

@Samuel Tai The Fritz repeater 1750E seems to support multiple wired devices:

FRITZ!Repeater im FRITZ!Box-Heimnetz einrichten | FRITZ!Repeater 1750E

Sie wollen einen FRITZ!Repeater einrichten und mit Ihrer FRITZ!Box verbinden? ✔ Mit dieser Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung geht das ganz einfach.

avm.de

 

[Yorick]

into your Fritzbox

I’m questioning whether they own the Fritz!box, because of the “without access to the router” comment. Which would make this infinitely more challenging. And something this forum may not be able to solve.

 

[Samuel Tai]

I’m questioning whether they own the Fritz!box, because of the “without access to the router” comment. Which would make this infinitely more challenging. And something this forum may not be able to solve.

If this is indeed the case, then a nested router may be the answer:

Attach the WLAN repeater to the nested router's WAN interface, and run the FreeNAS server and workstation on the nested router's LAN ports. The nested router would need to use a different IP subnet than the existing FRITZ!Box's LAN subnet. The workstation would have full 1G bandwidth to the FreeNAS server, and would have 200M over Wi-Fi to the FRITZ!Box router for Internet access. This will have less than ideal Internet access due to the dual-NAT, but I've run this setup before, and it works.

This also provides some protection for the workstation and FreeNAS server from anyone else attached to the FRITZ!Box router's WLAN, especially if the nested router has firewall capability.

 

[FredHansen]

Well, that's a really cool idea, but it also comes with the drawback of not having any access to the nas from the router.

I’m questioning whether they own the Fritz!box, because of the “without access to the router” comment. Which would make this infinitely more challenging. And something this forum may not be able to solve.

Unfortunately this is indeed the case, my landlord doesn't like the idea of me reconfiguring or replugging the router.

Theoretically, I need the fast connection only during backups and only between the NAS and the workstation. It might be a stupid question, but is there a way to simply connect the two with a cable and access the NAS directly over the cable for as long as the backup is running?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Theoretically, I need the fast connection only during backups and only between the NAS and the workstation. It might be a stupid question, but is there a way to simply connect the two with a cable and access the NAS directly over the cable for as long as the backup is running?

Yes, this can be done, so long as the direct connection uses a different subnet from the Wi-Fi connection, and your sharing protocol is also configured to use the second connection.

 

[FredHansen]

Ooooooookay: After messing around with many different network settings, I finally found a solution which delivers the connection speed I need to backup my stuff: My landlord and I agreed to install PLCs (one at the router and one at my room), so I have a pretty nice connection to the router, which is also nice to have for my workstation, but not the actual solution to the problem (connection speed between NAS and workstation via router is around 20mbyte/s). I got to choose the model of the PLC and thank god I chose the one with two Ethernet jacks instead of one. Why is that? Long story short: My so called fast-Ethernet-switch turned out to be a reckless bottleneck not supporting speeds above 11mbyte/s BUT the PLC does the job very good. With the NAS and the workstation each connected to the PLC in my room, I finally have
- a fast Ethernet connection between the workstation and the NAS using the PLC as kind of ‘gigabit switch’ reaching speeds of 80Mbyte/s or higher
- a slow WIFI connection from my NAS to any device which is fast enough for transferring / streaming some data
- no strange non-dhcp subnet configurations on my NAS any more (default settings work perfectly, access via freenas.local domain)

My final configuration: NAS and workstation connected to PLC in my room (no repeater anymore); PLC in other room connected router
It really is surprisingly simple…

Thank you very for helping me to figure this out!
Fred

EDIT: It was my mistake to think that the switch would support 1000Mbits/s

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Would you post a picture of your switch? Curious what jind of device would be such a bottleneck in 2020. Even the cheapest unmanaged consumer switch should deliver 1G ...

Picture oft the model/serial/etc. sticker would be great!

 

[FredHansen]

Would you post a picture of your switch? Curious what jind of device would be such a bottleneck in 2020. Even the cheapest unmanaged consumer switch should deliver 1G ...

Picture oft the model/serial/etc. sticker would be great!

Yes of course. The switch is an old TP-LINK TL-SF-1008D Version 4.1. I looked it up on the manufactorer's page, but the switch seems to be too old to be supported in 2020, currently they go from version 6 to 11. I guess I can't rely on second hand hardware, even if it sais "fast Ethernet"... xP

Note to be fair: I have to admit that I misinterpreted the label "fast Ethernet" as gigabit Ethernet. Given that the hardware is old, it was my mistake to think it would support Gigabit-Ethernet, so I can't blame the manufactorer.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbit/s by definition. But why buy used when you can get a brand new Gigabit switch for 15€?

Bot Check

That's why I automatically assumed the switch could not be the problem. You can walk into any retail store like Saturn or Media Markt, pick up the cheapest piece of plastic that says "Gigabit switch" on the box and it will work in a home setup. It's become a commodity ...

 

[FredHansen]

Because I had the switch it lying around, I like to reuse as much hardware as I can