[jdswifty]

Hi Guys

I'm after a bit of networking help.
I work with a uk kids charity (Dreamflight) & as part of a volunteer crew of 6 cameramen working out in Orlando every October for 10 days. Each night we have to back up the footage shot that day onto a NAS box.

The current setup is a HP Microserver running freeNAS with a gigabit port with 5 2TB discs running raid5,
the NAS is connected to a NetGear GS724T Gigabit Ethernet Switch using single CAT6 cable.
The 6 laptops used by the cameramen all connect into the switch using CAT6 (all laptops have gigabit ports on)

What I’m finding is that the NAS & laptops are not picking up a IP address as no router is attached to the switch. I have a basic household router which is 10/100 that when connected to the switch, allows the whole setup to work...or so I think........
My worry is that I don't know if adding the router means that all the traffic is then being routed through the router at 100mb & is defeating the object of having the Gigabit switch.

I'd also be interesting in hearing any tips for tuning the switch to handle all the data were putting though it, each cameraman is shooting about 64GB per day & that all needs to be downloaded to the NAS in a few short hours at night. Although I’m guessing the real bottle neck would be the single gigabit link to the NAS, i have the option to add 2 additional gigabit cards to the NAS, I don't know if that is something worth exploring or not?

I work within application support so i have some tech background but Networking is not in my list of skills unfortunately

any help would be greatly appreciated

HP Microserver Specs
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en...009.html?dnr=1

Netgear Switch Specs
http://www.netgear.co.uk/service-pro...s/gs724ts.aspx#

[TerryNet]

My worry is that I don't know if adding the router means that all the traffic is then being routed through the router at 100mb & is defeating the object of having the Gigabit switch.

With the router, NAS and all computers connected to the switch the only traffic that goes to or from the router is traffic meant for the router--request for dynamic IP configuration and any internet access. Your gigabit network among the NAS and computers remains as gigabit.

I haven't looked at the documentation for the switch so don't know if any "tuning" is possible, but the bottle necks are the NAS, the one cable connecting it, and (possibly) limitations of the computers.

[jdswifty]

Cheers Terry

back to the switch connection to the NAS, do you think a managed switch would allow me to route traffic to certain ports on the switch?

I have the option to add 2 additional NICs to the nasbox, so was just wondering if i can have ports 1 & 2 on the switch route to the port connected to NIC1, then ports 3&4 to NIC2 & so on? that would split the load evenly across 3 nics so you would only have 2 laptops using that NIC instead of 6

[TerryNet]

I know absolutely zero about managed switches, so cannot comment.

[zx10guy]

You could invoke the layer 2 ACL function of the Netgear switch. But good luck getting it to work. I wasn't able to get it to work properly on my GS748TP.

The better way to do it is to either use link aggregation or look on FreeNAS to see if there is some sort of load balancing configuration which uses a virtual IP bond to the multiple NICs you have on the HP server. The link aggregation will do true and better load sharing across ports on the HP server connected to the switch via various dynamic algorithms and hashing techniques. If FreeNAS supports a virtual IP bound to the multiple NICs then it will probably also have its own method of load balancing.