Correcting Link Speed Negotiation Issues in FreeNas 9.x

Freenas is one of the best file server operating systems available today. It utilizes the power of the ZFS file system, the stability of the FreeBSD platform, and has a great web based administration console that both powerful and easy to setup.

For all of its positive qualities, nothing is perfect as I ran into a major issue with the NIC card driver when upgrading from the FreeNAS 8.3 to 9.1

Link Speed issues

Improved performance is one of the features of the FreeNAS move to a FreeBSD 9.x code base. The upgrade procedure went smoothly, but then I was very disappointed to find my NFS and SMB transfers were very slow or timing out. A ping test over my wireless network didn’t show any dropped packets so I ruled out the network configuration early in the troubleshooting process.

I SSH’d in to the local console and found the following in the NIC configuration:

alc0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500

options=c3098<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO,LINKSTATE>

ether 00:25:11:c4:fa:73

inet 192.168.6.6 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.6.255

inet6 fe80::225:11ff:fec4:fa73%alc0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1

nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

media: Ethernet autoselect (10baseT/UTP <full-duplex>)

status: active

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The Fix:

After you apply the change, the server will go offline for ~30sec.

[root@mars] ~# ifconfig

alc0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500

options=c3098<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO,LINKSTATE>

ether 00:25:11:c4:fa:73

inet6 fe80::225:11ff:fec4:fa73%alc0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1

inet 192.168.6.6 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.6.255

nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

media: Ethernet 1000baseT <full-duplex>

status: active

Enjoy your file server!

Craig Lee is the Director of Technology at Blue Medora. Craig has over 10 years of IT experience and oversees IT, Support, and QA operations at Blue Medora.