How to access multiple NICs from a plugin in a Jail

[Dave Boulden]

I am running FreeNAS-11.3-U2.1 on the system listed in my signature. I have a Jail setup running the BackupPC plugin v11.2-RELEASE-p15.

I have added a Chelsio N320E 10GbE NIC to the FreeNAS server and my main Win10 PC to make a direct peer-to-peer connection alongside my existing 1Gb network (via a Gigabit unmanaged switch). The idea is to give me a faster connection from my PC to the FreeNAS for backups.

I can access a share on the FreeNAS from my PC and copy files over the 10Gb network with no problem. I can ping my Win10 PC over the 10Gb network from the main shell on FreeNAS. I can access the FreeNAS GUI on both networks (I bound it to both NICs).

The jail running BackupPC (and hence BackupPC itself too) can not see my Win10 PC on the 10Gb network.

Can I configure a jail to use or bind to more than one NIC?

For info:
on the 1Gb network, my Win10 PC is on 192.168.10.205/24 and FreeNAS is on 192.168.10.98/24
on the 10Gb network, my Win10 PC is on 192.168.20.20/24 and the FreeNAS is on 192.168.20.10/24

 

[Dave Boulden]

I have narrowed this down further today. I have worked out now how to add 2 IP addresses on separate NICs which involved unticking the "VNET" option.

The issue now seems to be that BackupPC4 requires VNET. Can anyone suggest why or suggest how (or indeed, if) I can configure two address on separate NICs using VNET?

I'm also wondering if this post should now be in the Plugins forum.

 

[Dave Boulden]

I have found something of a working solution and so thought I should post my results for the sake of completeness and to share with anyone else in the same boat. To summarise the requirement, I wanted to run backups of my main PC to FreeNAS over a dedicated peer-to-peer 10GbE network (Chelsio N320E NICs with SR optical SPF+ modules and a 15m fibre cable) and all other systems over the standard 1GbE network via a TP Link switch.

The solution that has worked for me involves the following key parameters (all else defaulted) for the jail running BackupPC (where ix2 is my 1GbE NIC on 192.168.10.237/24 and cxgb0 is my 10GbE NIC on 192.168.20.30/24):

Basic Properties Tab

DHCP	off
NAT	off
VNET	off
Berkeley Packet Filter	off
IPv4 Interface (1)	i/f: ix2, IP Addr: 192.168.10.237, Mask: 24
IPv4 Interface (2)	i/f: cxgb0, IP Addr: 192.168.20.30, Mask: 24

Network Properties Tab

interfaces	ix2:bridge0,cxgb0:bridge0
vnet_default_interface	cxgb0

The critical breakthrough in my trial and error testing was finally working out (the penny took a long while to drop!) that VNET wasn't required by the Backup PC process (which gets referred to as "bpc") but rather was the Berkeley Packet Filter (which gets referred to as "bpf"). So switching off VNET and Berkely Packet Filter allowed me to create two NICs in the IPv4 networking to bind both NICs. The final part to connect it all was the syntax of the interfaces entry on the Network Properties tab. I had tried a straight list of "ix2,cxgb0" which didn't work and the documentation says the format should be "vnetX:bridgeX" so I tried the eventual solution of "ix2:bridge0,cxgb0:bridge0" by educated guesswork.

Now that I have the jail using both NICs the issue now is speeding up the utilisation of the 10GbE network.