The best laid plans…
I’ve been doing a hard drive shuffle in an attempt to utilize ZFS on FreeBSD some more in one set of my systems. Well, I decided that I wanted a direct dedicated network between one pair of boxes, but the catch is that there are no more expansion slots available to plug in another network card. That got me looking at the onboard FireWire port. I had read about the capability of runnning IP over FireWire and so I looked into it some more. Things looked good, so I set forth with that as my plan — I’d run a FireWire network between the two machines. Well today I got the boxes together, plugged-in the FireWire cable and configured the virtual fwip interface on both. What’s the typical first test? ping. BAM! Immediate kernel panic on the pinger (running FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 amd64). Ugh, what did I do wrong? My on-the-fly plan B was to try the fwe interface instead. It’s not as recommended, as it doesn’t implement a standard like the fwip interface does, but both boxes are going to be FreeBSD anyway, why not try it? It didn’t have any problems. I need to do some more network speed testing, but so far so good. I’d really like to be able to up the MTU, as I plan to use the interface primarily for NFS, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible. Tonight I did some digging to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem with the fwip interface and I found a bug report:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=139162
Well, at least it wasn’t me. It’s the only reference I’ve found to this problem, so it’s probably low-priority for 8.0-RELEASE, but who knows. I’m just thankful that there is a viable work-around.
