Am I Restricted In How Many NICs I Can Add To A System?

[WiteWulf]

Is there a restriction on how many NICs I can add to a system based on how many the hardware I'm emulating (ie. DS918+ or DS3615xs) has?

 

I've tried adding two additional NICs to a 918+ VM on ESXi, using PCI passthrough. This is in addition to an existing vNIC using e1000e driver. The existing vNIC is still there, the first PCI NIC shows up, but not the second. If I ssh in, though, I can see all three NICs using "ip a", although eth2 is "down"

 

Issuing "ifconfig eth2 up" then brings the NIC up *and* it's now visible in the DSM Control Panel 🤔

 

NB, all three NICs are declared in grub.cfg as mac1, mac2, mac3

[flyride]

DS918+ has internal synoinfo.cfg parameter maxlanport which is defaulted to 2 ports.  You can change it but it will get overwritten on DSM upgrade, so be careful it doesn't disable your LAN because you didn't think about it.

[WiteWulf]

Even after going through the steps above and making eth2 "visible" to DSM, it fails to add it to a channel bond with eth1 (it fails silently with no error). it's the channel bond that I'm trying to do this for, fwiw.

 

I note that the 918+ has two NICs and the 3615xs has four. I may give it another try with a 3615xs image.

 

More info:

 

What I'm actually trying to do here is set up a dedicated direct connection between this VM and a physical QNAP box using two GigE ports at each end, channel bonded, with a private IP on each, to do very fast NFS transfers over a dedicated link with no other traffic. I figure I could either:

 

- pass through the PCI NICs on the ESXi host to the guest (along with the existing vNIC that has the systems services bind to it) and configure them as a bond

 

- create a vSwitch on ESXi with these two NICs configured as uplinks and attach a vmxnet3 interface to the guest on this switch

 

I thought the first option would be simpler, but it's not looking that way now

Edited October 7, 2021 by WiteWulf

[ThorGroup]

With RP just add it to the synoinfo parameter in user_conf

In general you can add up to 4 ports with RP now as the LKM only supports mac1-mac4 syntax. There's a newer syntax called "macs" which accepts comma-separated values but its validation was more complex and we didn't add it yet (but there's a todo in the code).

[WiteWulf]

Thanks for the helpful responses folks, that makes sense. I moved the existing NIC to vmxnet3 and added a second one, also vmxnet3, to the system and it's working properly now with two NICs.

Edited October 8, 2021 by WiteWulf

[WiteWulf]

Sorted:

[WiteWulf]

15 hours ago, flyride said:

DS918+ has internal synoinfo.cfg parameter maxlanport which is defaulted to 2 ports.  You can change it but it will get overwritten on DSM upgrade, so be careful it doesn't disable your LAN because you didn't think about it.

FYI, even with maxlanports=4 and the interfaces all declared in grub.cfg, NICs 3 and 4 (eth2 and eth3) didn't appear in Control Panel until I ssh'd in and ran 'ifconfig eth2 up', for example. Once I'd done that it always failed to create the bond using the web ui, so I used synonet instead and that worked fine. Then rebooted to check it persisted between reboots and it's all good.

Edited October 8, 2021 by WiteWulf

[pocopico]

On 10/8/2021 at 8:31 AM, ThorGroup said:

With RP just add it to the synoinfo parameter in user_conf

In general you can add up to 4 ports with RP now as the LKM only supports mac1-mac4 syntax. There's a newer syntax called "macs" which accepts comma-separated values but its validation was more complex and we didn't add it yet (but there's a todo in the code).

 

I dont think it matters, lets think the option of adding a USB ethenet card. Will the MAC address create a problem in DSM ? I suppose no.

 

I've compiled the module and have used succesfully a USB ethernet controller for adding one more card in my N34L with RP and 7.0.1

Edited October 9, 2021 by pocopico

[Polanskiman]

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