Hi Guys,
Just back in the door after a long long day.
Well it's all up and running and have learned a precious lesson.
After many phonecalls with the ISP and digging about on forums I got up, walked away from the desk and got some fresh air. I decided to go back to basics.
First up, check the cat5 cabling. Whilst checking it, (by pinging the LAN and WAN interfaces) with a direct connection to my laptop, I found I couldn't ping the WAN interface. I thought, gotcha!! There must be a problem with the cable. Swapped it out, same with the replacement cable. Then I started looking at the WAN NIC. This was a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit integrated with the motherboard. Remember, I thought I had got it working the previous day so it must be compatible. Went to the Free BSD compatability hardware list. It had lots of Broadcom NetXtreme cards all in the Broadcom NetXtreme II family but not the original. I was gutted. I was sure I had checked it beforehand and remember I was more concerned about the Sundance (ST201) card, that is supported. So in the end I didn't use the motherboard NIC but put in another Sundance (ST201) card and hey presto!! All up and running and no speed degradation.
I feel frustrated, tired and more than a little bit stupid….grrr!!
Anyone else reading this post....check the hardware compatibility list. Save yourself some blood sweat and tears ;-)
Have ammended the original posting accordingly.
Thanks for the help anyway guys.
Kind Regards,
Niall