Lagg eth+WiFi configuration - works but not "by the book"

[Valeri Galtsev]

Dear Experts,

I run FreeBSD on my laptop for a couple of years at least, but finally I
decided to climb off the tree, and configure networking right. Namely:
make a single configuration, and have it using wired connection when
available, and wireless when disconnected from wired network. Lagg with
failover from wired to wireless seems to be right thing, so I followed
brilliant FreeBSD handbook:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-aggregation.html

Which never worked for me (WiFi claimed authentication failure), even
though each of connections enabled one at a time worked well.

I have found workaround: Instead of starting wlan0 with MAC address of
wired adapter as described in handbook, I did the opposite and started
wired interface with MAC address of wireless, then created lagg, - did the
rest by the book. Which works nicely, I'll paste my /etc/rc.conf below in
case someone has trouble I had.

I wonder what I was doing wrong when I followed the handbook and it didn't
work for me. Any obvious "pilot error"?


Here is relevant portion of my working /etc/rc.conf (with obfuscated MAC
address, note that MAC address I start wired card with 70:18:8b:XX:XX:XX
is MAC address that WiFi card has):

ifconfig
...
wlan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	ether 70:18:8b:XX:XX:XX
...

cat /etc/rc.conf
...
ifconfig_em0="up"
ifconfig_em0="ether 70:18:8b:XX:XX:XX"
wlans_ath0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA"
create_args_wlan0="country US"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="up laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport wlan0 DHCP"
...

Thanks.
Valeri

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++