Interesting on how money can motivate you to dig into even issues on your personal network. Because I was paying for my ISP’s gigabit service and wasn’t getting the full data rate I decided to start troubleshooting. If you read my initial post on my description of my home network then you are familiar with my setup. Well it has changed drastically.
Problem: On the old setup I was only getting about 125-180 Mbps down and 125-160 Mbps up.
Blame 1: I was using Netgear’s power line adapters to establish layer 1 to the ISPs Fiber Optic Modem in another room in the house. It is well understood that power line adapters only work at an optimal speed if they are on the same circuit. They were not.
Fix 1: I ran a CAT 5 through the wall from the room with the FOM to the room with my server equipment without the power line adapters in place.
Result: Absolutely no change in performance and throughput. I was frustrated to say the least.
Blame 2: My Cisco ISR 1100 was eating my data rate and throughput. The configs are rather simple on this device and it is really running the NAT environment. I did use port groups and address groups to cut down on the ACL entries through the device. I also verified that all ports were hard coded as speed 1000 (Mbps) and full duplex. There has been known issues that crop up every once in a while with the interface auto settings.
Troubleshooting 1: I decided to see if the performance changed if I removed the ACLs from both the internal and WAN facing interfaces. There was a noticeable improvement, but only about 20-30 Mbps down and up. I was still not hitting the full 1 Gbps data rates that I was paying for.
Troubleshooting 2: I hung my laptop off of one of the interfaces on the ISP’s modem/router to verify I was indeed getting what I was paying for and I was. Note, I should have started with this first but I wanted to get the power line adapters out of my network anyway due to loss of sync issues they have had in the past.
Fix 2: I decided to install a PFSense Firewall on my server and add a portgroup and vSwitch and tied it to another vmnic to connect to the ISP’s modem/router. Once I had all the sub-interfaces configured on the firewall and DHCP servers started on the wired and WiFi network my data rate and throughput shot through the roof.
Next Blog will be my documentation of a Saturday spent installing and configuring my PFSense Firewall on my ESXI 6.7 hypervisor.
Enjoy and I look forward to your comments.
HOME NETWORKING 