I'm having a hard time putting together a vlan for a multi-port trunk... I'm new to FreeBSD & not entirely familiar with config file locations. I've gone through a few online mini-vlan FAQs, but I'm getting stuck in a few places.

So far...
I've made a new kernel with "device vlan" per 'man vlan'
I've added if_vlan_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf per 'man vlan'

now I'm not too sure what to do... the mini-faq was pretty unclear & the others I've found are out of date.

I have 6 NICs on this computer. 2 on the mobo & 4 on a PCIx car. I want to use the 4 on the PCIx card for the trunk. They show up as interfaces em2-em5. I have all of them configured to the same IP, but I don't know how to group them as a vlan.

This is a brand new install of FreeBSD 6.1

Suggestions?

In case anyone else comes across this....

vlan/802.1q is not the correct solution for link aggregation ("trunking" for high throughput). 802.3ad is the correct protocol & is not supported under FreeBSD as yet.

OpenBSD has something called "trunk" that is supposed to handle it. NetBSD has a driver called "agr" that does it - the agr driver is a kernel module so it requires a kernel recompile.

OpenBSD wouldn't install on my system & NetBSD doesn't have vlan in the release snapshot of the kernel source. I attempted to get the current (cvs) source tree, but couldn't get the kernel to compile with the non-release snapshot (made several attempts - being new to BSD didn't help), so I ditched BSD & went back to Linux. Deadlines are a bitch.

FYI: Under Linux, this is all pretty easy. There's a kernel module called "bonding" that's built into the kernel on most newer distros. You load up the modules in 802.3ad mode by:

modprobe bonding mode=4 miimon=100

then you need a program called ifenslave (which was availble through my default apt-source in Ubuntu). at that point, it's just:

ifconfig bond0 <ip address> up
ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1 eth2....


Evidently, the setup under NetBSD is similarly simple once you get the agr driver running.