D945GCLF2 Board, Atom330
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Hmmm… So there is problems with this board then still? I didn't experience it in testing but... Damn I just deployed one, I guess I will see...
It doesn't seem to occur very often if at all. I've had the box online for 2½ weeks in production (with 1.2.3) and only encountered this problem yesterday. IMO, it could be a problem with the onboard Realtek NIC. I'm not exactly fond of Realtek chipsets but I had to make do with it.
I already had hell trying to convince my partner in charge of accounts that a dedicated box was needed over the WRT-350N he had lying around.
Needless to say, he only budged after the WRT-350N hung within 5 minutes of deployment and we were bleeding 3 times the cost of the Pfsense box everyday for 3 days from the downtime. Now, I'm just gonna order a Pro/1000 MT dual port adapter off ebay and charge it directly to accounts. =P -
lol ya well the reason I went with Pfsense for this client is because all the consumer dlink and linksys products were locking up and he had to keep rebooting them, don't want this to happen again with this system…
Wonder if I could put a Trendnet USB NIC in to replace the onboard if this occurs... Don't know if pfsense would pick it up though. -
lol ya well the reason I went with Pfsense for this client is because all the consumer dlink and linksys products were locking up and he had to keep rebooting them, don't want this to happen again with this system…
Wonder if I could put a Trendnet USB NIC in to replace the onboard if this occurs... Don't know if pfsense would pick it up though.As long as the state tables and QoS is set-up properly, you shouldn't have any issues with the system locking up (hardware issues aside, of course).
Might want to pick-up an Intel dual-port PCI(X) adapter off ebay though. They're a lot cheaper than from most online retail stores like Newegg. I have a lower regard for USB ethernet adapters than even Realtek NICs.Anyway, when I had the box on PFsense 1.2.x previously, it was stable for more than 80 days. A power outage killed the uptime and of course, as I mentioned before, it took too many reboots to get the hdd to mount then.
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All I can say is that the problem I had was not pfsense related, as it appeared also in windows. It would last 1+ days then the the box would stop responding (but if I went to the physical box all appeared fine except no network). I at first tried updating the bios (thought that made the most sense), but it still caused me problems. I was alsmost going to RMA and trash it, but I put another nic (intel) and all the problems went away. It was not worth the both to RMA at that point, and it just simply works.
Based on they have sold many of these boards, and most people are working ok, I blame mine as an isolated hardware defect.
Good board otherwise. cheap and normally works…. -
Would be nice if Realtek just quit making NIC cards period!! But given the low price point over Intel they rather go cheap with it. So I always keep spare Intel NICs around and put em in routers. I haven't had any problems with 4 port 100Mb D-Link server card which I also got off of ebay on the cheap. It works so well that I picked up another card as a spare, also off of ebay.
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Would be nice if Realtek just quit making NIC cards period!! But given the low price point over Intel they rather go cheap with it. So I always keep spare Intel NICs around and put em in routers. I haven't had any problems with 4 port 100Mb D-Link server card which I also got off of ebay on the cheap. It works so well that I picked up another card as a spare, also off of ebay.
I do know some guys working for motherboard manufacturers and it isn't just price point. Realtek has managed to make their chipsets very easy to integrate on motherboards. Comparatively, one of them at least, has had to send development motherboards (and) trace designs to Marvell's German engineering to get goofball issues resolved. Implementing Broadcom wasn't even possible and Intel chipsets were about 4 to 5 times the price.
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If it was not for Realtek and Ralink making cheap wired and wireless for the masses the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.
Or atleast it would make adoption mildly prohibative.
One thing Realtek and Ralink have well under control is working with partners, if that's making a network card, drivers or a mainboard.
They also talk to opensource developers in general without jumping through nda hoopla.
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If it was not for Realtek and Ralink making cheap wired and wireless for the masses the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.
Or atleast it would make adoption mildly prohibative.
One thing Realtek and Ralink have well under control is working with partners, if that's making a network card, drivers or a mainboard.
They also talk to opensource developers in general without jumping through nda hoopla.
If what you say is true then why so many issues with the Nix / FreeBSD flavors? Heck, even some Window users experience issues with them.
I don't think hardware is the issue, it's the bad drivers or poorly implmented into an OS. Let's hope RealTek keeps trying to improve things.
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I don't think hardware is the issue, it's the bad drivers or poorly implmented into an OS. Let's hope RealTek keeps trying to improve things.
Hardware bugs that vary from one implementation to another are the problem. There are countless work arounds that keep getting added to the Realtek drivers in FreeBSD (and no doubt other OSes as well, I don't follow others as closely though) as people keep finding hardware that's buggy in new and different ways from other implementations of the exact same chipset.
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@cmb:
Hardware bugs that vary from one implementation to another are the problem. There are countless work arounds that keep getting added to the Realtek drivers in FreeBSD (and no doubt other OSes as well, I don't follow others as closely though) as people keep finding hardware that's buggy in new and different ways from other implementations of the exact same chipset.
Aye aye. Some of the issues are due to implementation of "features" in new OSes that don't play well with the firmware on the NIC's too.
eg. The problem my friend faced with the Yukon was that 1/2 the chips don't work well in Vista without a new driver patch because the chip wouldn't respond properly to the PCI-e Link Power Management.
Oddly, the same driver paired with an external card on the same chipset works fine. It's just the integrated chipset that won't play well. There are no issues with WinXP or other OS flavours either. The only solution was to manually disable the Link power state management in Vista Device Manager or update to a "newer" driver provided by the manufacturer (which does exactly just that). -
Well, I've had the box up and running in production for about 3 days so far and no problems, yet.
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System has been running for 5 days without a hiccup now.
Uptime is 9 days though (since the last hiccup resolved without a reboot).It could have been a backend issue on my ISP side but I never got a notification from them. Time to cause them a little more grief I guess.
Had already made them replace the CPE (Cisco 1710 to Cisco 877) just because I didn't like the fact that they gave me a end-of-line and end-of-shelflife CPE. Just told them that the 1710 was flaky and churned out some "evidence" of the hop between my router and the CPE taking as long as 100ms.
The engineer who came down had a nice time though. I let him play World of Warcraft for 2 hours (I run a CyberCafe) and told the n.o.c. that he was running tests for me during that time.Only thing I couldn't figure out is why they actually deployed the connection the way they did it. All the other ISP's provide an IPoA connection and the CPE is a Bridge/ Gateway combo. Thus, allowing me to deploy my own bridge cum gateway if I don't like their equipment. Or for that matter, actually modifying their CPE for my uses; did it before by flashing a ST516 and converting it into bridged mode (I told them and they said it was ok as long as I return the modem in good working condition).
This ISP actually has the CPE as a BGP router so I can technically access their "internal" network. They conveniently gave me the cisco console cable too. Or more so, the engineer was too lazy to lug the box of accessories back. He didn't have an issue when I told him I could re-configure the 877 so long as I didn't lock the n.o.c. out from the 877.
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I just broke 90 days uptime with pfsense running on this board. Sadly, I'm going to have to take the router down for maintenance in the next few days as I'm having a dedicated 100 amp circuit run to my office. Why? Because I'm running running 14 computers on 1 20amp circuit which isn't really smart. ;) Hehe.