The lagg(4) interface allows aggregation of multiple network interfaces as one virtual interface for the purpose of providing fault-tolerance and high-speed links.
The following operating modes are supported by lagg(4):
Sends and receives traffic only through the master port. If the master port becomes unavailable, the next active port is used. The first interface added is the master port and any interfaces added after that are used as failover devices. If failover to a non-master port occurs, the original port will become master when it becomes available again.
Cisco® Fast EtherChannel® (FEC) is a static setup and does not negotiate aggregation with the peer or exchange frames to monitor the link. If the switch supports LACP, that should be used instead.
FEC balances outgoing traffic across the active ports based on hashed protocol header information and accepts incoming traffic from any active port. The hash includes the Ethernet source and destination address and, if available, the VLAN tag, and the IPv4 or IPv6 source and destination address.
The IEEE® 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and the Marker Protocol. LACP will negotiate a set of aggregable links with the peer in to one or more Link Aggregated Groups (LAGs). Each LAG is composed of ports of the same speed, set to full-duplex operation. The traffic will be balanced across the ports in the LAG with the greatest total speed. In most cases, there will only be one LAG which contains all ports. In the event of changes in physical connectivity, LACP will quickly converge to a new configuration.
LACP balances outgoing traffic across the active ports based on hashed protocol header information and accepts incoming traffic from any active port. The hash includes the Ethernet source and destination address and, if available, the VLAN tag, and the IPv4 or IPv6 source and destination address.
This is an alias of FEC mode.
Distributes outgoing traffic using a round-robin scheduler through all active ports and accepts incoming traffic from any active port. This mode violates Ethernet frame ordering and should be used with caution.
This example connects two interfaces on a FreeBSD machine to the switch as a single load balanced and fault tolerant link. More interfaces can be added to increase throughput and fault tolerance. Frame ordering is mandatory on Ethernet links and any traffic between two stations always flows over the same physical link, limiting the maximum speed to that of one interface. The transmit algorithm attempts to use as much information as it can to distinguish different traffic flows and balance across the available interfaces.
On the Cisco® switch, add the
FastEthernet0/1
and
FastEthernet0/2
interfaces to
channel group 1
:
interface FastEthernet0/1
channel-group 1
mode active
channel-protocol lacp
!
interface FastEthernet0/2
channel-group 1
mode active
channel-protocol lacp
Create the lagg(4) interface using
fxp0
and
fxp1
, and bring the interfaces up
with the IP address of
10.0.0.3/24
:
#
ifconfig fxp0
up
#
ifconfig fxp1
up
#
ifconfig lagg0
create
#
ifconfig lagg0
up laggproto lacp laggport fxp0
laggport fxp1
10.0.0.3/24
View the interface status by running:
#
ifconfig lagg0
Ports marked as ACTIVE are part of the active aggregation group that has been negotiated with the remote switch. Traffic will be transmitted and received through active ports. Use the verbose output of ifconfig(8) to view the LAG identifiers.
To see the port status on the Cisco® switch, use
show lacp neighbor
:
For more detail, type show lacp neighbor
detail
.
To retain this configuration across reboots, the
following entries can be added to
/etc/rc.conf
:
fxp0
="up"
ifconfig_fxp1
="up"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0
"
ifconfig_lagg0
="laggproto lacp laggport fxp0
laggport fxp1
10.0.0.3/24
"Failover mode can be used to switch over to a secondary
interface if the link is lost on the master interface.
To configure failover mode, first bring the underlying
physical interfaces up. Then, create the lagg(4)
interface, using fxp0
as the
master interface and fxp1
as
the secondary interface, and assign an IP
address of
10.0.0.15/24
:
#
ifconfig fxp0
up
#
ifconfig fxp1
up
#
ifconfig lagg0
create
#
ifconfig lagg0
up laggproto failover laggport fxp0
laggport fxp1
10.0.0.15/24
The interface should now look something like this:
#
ifconfig lagg0
lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=8<VLAN_MTU>
ether 00:05:5d:71:8d:b8
inet 10.0.0.15 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: active
laggproto failover
laggport: fxp1 flags=0<>
laggport: fxp0 flags=5<MASTER,ACTIVE>Traffic will be transmitted and received on
fxp0
. If the link is lost on
fxp0
,
fxp1
will become the active link.
If the link is restored on the master interface, it will
once again become the active link.
To retain this configuration across reboots, the
following entries can be added to
/etc/rc.conf
:
fxp0
="up"
ifconfig_fxp1
="up"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0
"
ifconfig_lagg0
="laggproto failover laggport fxp0
laggport fxp1
10.0.0.15/24
"For laptop users, it is usually desirable to configure the wireless device as a secondary interface, which is used when the wired connection is not available. With lagg(4), it is possible to use one IP address, prefer the wired connection for both performance and security reasons, while maintaining the ability to transfer data over the wireless connection.
In this setup, override the underlying wireless interface's MAC address to match that of the lagg(4), which is inherited from the wired interface.
In this example, the wired interface,
bge0
, is the master, and the
wireless interface, wlan0
, is
the failover interface. The
wlan0
device was created from
iwn0
, which will be configured
with the wired connection's MAC address.
The first step is to determine the MAC
address of the wired interface:
#
ifconfig bge0
bge0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=19b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
ether 00:21:70:da:ae:37
inet6 fe80::221:70ff:feda:ae37%bge0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: activeReplace bge0
to match the
system's interface name. The ether
line will contain the MAC address of
the wired interface. Now, change the
MAC address of the underlying wireless
interface:
#
ifconfig iwn0
ether 00:21:70:da:ae:37
Bring the wireless interface up, but do not set an IP address:
#
ifconfig wlan0
create wlandev iwn0
ssid my_router
up
Bring the bge0
interface up.
Create the lagg(4) interface with
bge0
as master, and failover to
wlan0
:
#
ifconfig bge0
up
#
ifconfig lagg0
create
#
ifconfig lagg0
up laggproto failover laggport bge0
laggport wlan0
The interface will now look something like this:
#
ifconfig lagg0
lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=8<VLAN_MTU>
ether 00:21:70:da:ae:37
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: active
laggproto failover
laggport: wlan0 flags=0<>
laggport: bge0 flags=5<MASTER,ACTIVE>Then, start the DHCP client to obtain an IP address:
#
dhclient lagg0
To retain this configuration across reboots, the
following entries can be added to
/etc/rc.conf
:
lagg0
"
ifconfig_lagg0
="laggproto failover laggport bge0 laggport wlan0 DHCP"All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.