Link Aggregation on Synology NAS - My Mistake

hi there welcome to uh just a chat really a chat about synology nas and uh link aggregation synology nazis nazis what's the plural of naz nazis anyway i thought incorrectly that link aggregation worked on an unmanaged switch if you only use i think it's called adaptive load balancing and the reason i thought that is because if i go into the nas here and i go to network and into let's say into the help file for network and into link aggregation here there are various modes that you can you can choose from so firstly you've got adaptive load balancing and it says this mode optimizes the network traffic received and sent by your synology nas whether or not this the switch supports link aggregation to avoid unexpected errors please do not enable link aggregation on the switch even when it is supported so i thought mistakenly that this was the correct mode to use with an unmanaged switch i just had a simple tp-link uh switch you know no no web interface nothing just a basic switch and so i enabled link aggregation using adaptive load balancing and it will it suggested that it worked it came up in a very similar way to um to this here on the screen here so what you can see is that we have the lan one land two bonded network status two gig uh two gigabits happy right i mean that bond this here suggests that it's all correct and all happy but unfortunately it wasn't and little did i realize that and that it wasn't happy because it was it was actually there was a sort of broadcast storm going out across my network for about two months continuously one thing i did notice and i should have spotted it really is the fact that uh the both the lights on the nas were flashing all the time so and and also notice that on the switch itself it started to happen that all the lights would flash together all the time and of course they don't do that on a switch and they don't do that on the nas either if you got link aggregation setup correctly the different ports do different things depending on what they decide but that wasn't happening in my case both port lights were flashing on the nas and all the lights on my switch were suddenly flashing i should have spotted it well i did spot it i just didn't think anything of it at the time i thought maybe that's what it's supposed to do but basically uh i had various faults with various devices so the router in our living room just died on ethernet i mean it's like wi-fi was working but ethernet had died what i mean when does that ever happen that really threw me i was just like if anything dies wi-fi yeah wi-fi messes up occasionally but ethernet never ethernet just completely fell over and required a reboot of the router and i also had other devices i had a dock here where the gigabit ethernet device interface on that just failed and just suddenly stopped sending or receiving traffic and it was all ultimately because of this so now i have this tp-link switch so an actual managed switch where i have the um ports set up properly with link aggregation so i've got lip port five and port six here set up with um link aggregation and it connected it looked exactly the same as far as the synology nas was concerned but it just works properly and you can see that it works properly so i mean if i were to i'd this might not work in this particular instance but let's say if i go to filezilla here and i connect to my nas and i transfer a largish file down um or maybe maybe i'll gonna send one up actually i'll put one uh what have i got here so this one let me put that on the nas somewhere let's put this in test and transfer this right so we've got a file going to the nas now so let's have a look at the um traffic here we go no so we've got some traffic happening here on port five as we would expect got nothing happening currently on port six there's a little bit of traffic there but nothing significant at all port five is where the traffic's happening i don't know why we're not getting one gigabit per second it seems that synology is not always great in that regard um sometimes it works fine sometimes it doesn't don't know why this is over ftp at the moment but let's say i also start now to get my phone here and start streaming something so if i just pick a film and this is going to be over wi-fi so i'll just pick a film that i know is like a 4k film on here that i can stream which will come off the nas so let's play that and uh so what you'll see now is if i go into port six here we've now got traffic on there and that's the traffic from the that's sending to the phone sending to the wi-fi on the phone because that's the 4k film coming down so we've got two different things happening on the two different ports it's divvied up the traffic and it's doing different things on different ports so you know when you see that that link aggregation is doing exactly what it should in fact i can prove that to you because look if you watch that port there now if i pause this and go out of the app boom there we go look at that just plummets because that's the traffic no longer being sent over wi-fi so yeah i just wanted to make a quick video about this because if you've had any issue if you're using link aggregation on the synology now and you're thinking it's working i didn't notice any traffic problems i didn't notice any speed issues or anything like that if you're if you've spotted if you're using it with an unmanaged switch look out for that look out for some sort of uh just a broadcast storm of any kind or any sort of ex you know crazy lights on the switch or on the um or most of all look for the lights doing the same thing on the nas itself because they really shouldn't be not all the time i mean they might sometimes but uh not all the time and you'll probably find that you actually need to invest in a managed switch which in the case of this one which which devices this it's it's not particularly expensive um they're about i think they're about 100 pounds or something like that it's worth it anyway i mean it's a bit overkill for what i need but it means that i'm able to have that feature nice to have and you know that sort of bonded uh interface of uh two gigabits per second because you can see there that although i have no interfaces that are more than one gigabit per second you can it splits up the traffic and um and does you know just balances the load better than it otherwise would so let me know if you've had any experience experiences of this uh in the in the comments if you've if you kind of set stuff up if you i mean was i completely wrong to even think that an unmanaged switch could be used with link aggregation because and why doesn't synology why does it set it up correctly then i don't i don't know i don't see why it sets up the bond perfectly fine and yet throws it out and messes everything up oh before i go yeah another thing that i spotted actually if i go into my uh my router here my my fritz box so this is the router we use at home fritz box it's really really really nice actually i like it a lot even though it's not particularly well known so i'm going to enter the mesh network here and you can see all the um devices and the nas here this cans this this nas says it's connected via one gigabit per second this had two complete even though the ip was the same it had two connections so it had two of these showing on the router the router effectively had two devices using the same ip but it was working fine it basically messed everything up that one network error messed up so many things and then i started getting these not reporting their locations correctly you'd have devices on nodes that weren't actually on there at all it just screwed the whole thing up all because i was using it incorrectly on an unmanaged switch so there we go i don't know what else to say that's all i wanted to put in this video see you later

Channel: TDCatTech

Views: 27,627

Keywords: sinology, link aggregation, managed switch, broadcast storm, link aggregation not working, tp-link switch, networking, 2gbps, ds220, synology, nas storage, network attached storage, chat, thoughts, demo

Id: qQkW-ZANPYo

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021