Hi folks,

I have two CRS-226-24G-2S+-IN at home and have been very happy with them in use for a while now just as simple switches. Due to various construction problems in the house I have not managed to get 10Gig fibre run between them yet, however I do have two CAT6 cables between them and have been trying to get these bonded together for 2G bandwidth between the switches.

I have tried creating LACP bonds between the two using WebFig and the Interfaces->Bonding tab and not got anywhere. I create the bond at both ends, but no traffic will flow over the link if I try and ping from a machine at one end to a machine at the other. I've tried creating a bridge and then adding bonding1 as a port to that bridge at both ends having seen a very vague mention of it in a forum post, but no joy.

The only thing I got working was creating trunks (Switch -> Ports, trunk tab) and adding the two ports in as slaves at both ends, that does at least let me ping between things again, though I have no clue if it's making any difference to my aggregate speed at all.

Can anyone shed any light on how I can actually make this work?

Next I'd like to use LACP to be able to get a 2GB link from my Solaris server with two 1G NICs to one of the switches, but I've had exactly the same issues here as well. I use dladm to create the LACP aggregation on the Solaris end (I've definitely made this work before with Cisco switches), see it come up, set up the bond on the Mikrotik and then, no pings or anything. It must be a simple thing I'm missing here, but I can't figure out what it is.

I'd really like to be able to buy a new NAS this week and use LACP to get 4x1Gb ports on it bonded together, but if I'm not going to be able to actually make it work, it looks like I'm going to have to splash out on a more expensive one which supports 10gig. I really don't want to have to do that, especially seeing as my Solaris 11 box doesn't seem to like my 10Gig Sun NICs just now so I've pretty much got to get LACP working in some form or other or I can't achieve what I want.

Can someone please help me out before I rip my hair out in frustration?

Cheers,

Gavin.

Hi

Even if you are able to bring up the LACP, you will not have any effort as all ports on the CRS are connected with a total link speed of 1Gbps to the CPU.

Regards
Patrick

Thanks, went and bought the 10G capable NAS Seems a shame that LACP never got done in hardware.

If I am not wrong, I think you misunderstood LACP.

Borrowing a metaphor. LACP is like having more than one two-way road. You will certainly experience less congestion on the road due to having more than one, from A to B. But it does not make your car faster than what is currently the speed limit on the road.

I have LACP configured b/w Mikrotik router to my Netgear switch, and b/w the switch to my NAS. All are at 1Gb speed.

Due to different gears in between, I have to use standard 802.3ad. But it works fine.