I have just deployed my first Netgate XG-7100, and things have been going well. I currently have multiple VLANs all trunked to a single ethernet port on the integrated switch. (BIG shoutout to Tom for his excellent videos!) Now I am considering move the trunk port to a 10G SFP connection. It seems like it would be a simple process, but wanted to run it by here first to make sure it goes well.
I believe I would just need to change the parent interface for each VLAN under the Interfaces->VLAN? I’m guessing I could then go and remove all of the VLAN settings under the integrated switch. Am I missing anything? I have read the documentation, and this seems like what I need to do. I would have a relatively short window in which to make this change, and can’t afford to be wrong.
If you can’t afford to be wrong I’d take a backup and then double check you have the corresponding pfsense ISO to hand, Netgate only have the latest ISO on their site, if you need to roll back.
I don’t have a XG-7100 to test with at the moment but I do believe that you only need to change the VLAN parents interfaces and not the switch VLAN settings. Before you start make sure you have a backup and a cable for console access in case you have to roll it back real quick.
UPDATE: Well, the process didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated, but I learned a lot. I started by changing the parent interface of my VLANs. Initially, all was well. However, when I tried to move the main VLAN (which was set as 4091 on the ethernet switch), things went downhill. I guess I misunderstood the VLAN assignment of 4091. I changed the parent interface to the ix0 port (same as the others), and lost connectivity. To correct this, I used the console and went through the process of setting interfaces from the CLI to regain access. While this did get me back to the GUI, all of my interfaces, DHCP pools, and associated firewall rules were gone. D’oh!
No big deal, or so I thought. I re-added the interfaces, and then received errors about existing DHCP pools. My assumption is that by changing the interfaces through the CLI, it half overwrote the existing configs, but left the system in a broken state. It knew about the old DHCP pools, but it wouldn’t actually associate them with the newly recreated interfaces.
Long story short (too late), I ended up rebuilding the system from scratch. I’m sure there could have been some way to recover, but time didn’t allow for that and it was just easier to go from scratch. The system is now online using the 10G interfaces, and I walk away with more experience and knowledge than when I started (which is always a good thing).
I also want to switch to SFP + for the 7100, but according to your experience, I don’t trust myself anymore (I don’t have the time to hand it in anymore). Can you give me a rough guide?
