Just got Thinkpad R31…..

zephxiii

Just bought an R31 (PIII 1.13ghz/256mb ram 110 bux shipped!) to run Pfsense with the understanding that it supports PCMCIA cards. It's got an intel integrated 10/100 NIC which I didn't check but should be good to go lol.

I was wondering if anyone could point out a good PCMCIA ethernet card available today that is known to work great with pfsense etc.

Thanks.

hmeister

Zep:

PCMCIA - Xercom working - xe0 will show up…
I did not do a lot of testing however I use this card to just build 2.5 hard drives in a Thinkpad r51 with the xercom card...
Then I move them to Watchguard hardware.....
Xercom cards are cheap but I am not sure about watchguard timeouts...
(why don't you use something different? Small even - Check out the ALIX kits for under $200.00 us?
Currently running x700 Watchguard...

H.

zephxiii

@hmeister:

Zep:

PCMCIA - Xercom working - xe0 will show up…
I did not do a lot of testing however I use this card to just build 2.5 hard drives in a Thinkpad r51 with the xercom card...
Then I move them to Watchguard hardware.....
Xercom cards are cheap but I am not sure about watchguard timeouts...
(why don't you use something different? Small even - Check out the ALIX kits for under $200.00 us?
Currently running x700 Watchguard...

H.

I ended up getting:
3COM OFFICECONNECT 10/100 LAN PC CARD 3CCSH572BT

off of ebay for 12 bucks, based off the FreeBSD HCL.

I got the Thinkpad because i want a kb, mouse, monitor, battery, and low power all rolled up into one package….that and I love Thinkpads and i think its great to put an old one to use like that lol....and this one was cheap!!

zephxiii

Just got the R31 in today, looks like it was never used. Check power draw at the wall, 14.4 watts with the screen off!

Have been running pfsense on a Thinkpad T43 and it's been running great!

My only question is that will using the config backup be ok for moving to a new machine?

taryezveb

Another option would have been, using a smart switch and vlans. This what I did with my Thinkpad T23 with Netgear GS108T switch. Witch has worked great, can read more about that here:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,28379.0.html

zephxiii

That's pretty interesting.

zephxiii

I actually ran into some weird thing where a certain NIC was preventing RRD Graphs from running…so it seems. I actually have 3 different nics, 2 of them were sold together and are double deckers that don't use a dongle (as their are big enough for have the jack built in).

Trying to swap to the R31 today, I tried to use this 3Comm 3C3FE574BT double decker nic instead of this other 3com nic i had in the T43. I couldn't use it in the 3C3FE574BT T43 because there is a metal splitter in between the two slots.

Anyways setup went fine and everything was working right except RRD Graphs which was from some reason not working, and I mean not even the System graph was working with "nan" in the text statistics. I thought something got screwed up when i loaded the config file that I saved so i reinstalled pfsense and just got to the point where i could login and take a peak at RRD Graphs which still appeared to not be working.

I ended up doing a fresh install but this time with the NIC i used in the T43 and they seem to be working again. I ended up reinstalling because i tried to swap interface roles and pfsense appeared to do it, but they never actually swapped for some reason.

I guess i'm going to mess around a little more. I have that other double decker which is slightly different (3C3SH573BT) and will give that a try.

EDIT: The 3C3SH573BT works like a charm.

EDIT: The 3C3SH573BT does not work like a charm, i'm getting watchdog timeouts with it. Need to find another brand.

omegadraconis

For my pfsense I'm using an acer 3000 laptop, To get my second nic I opted to go with an mini-pci nic. I found mine in the bin at my local computer shop but, ebay has several intel modem/nic combo cards for next to nothing.

zephxiii

Yea, i've been thinking about looking at intel NICs since the integrated ones are Intel and work fine.

EDIT: I went back to that 3COM OFFICECONNECT 10/100 LAN PC CARD 3CCSH572BT with the dongle, 1day 22hrs uptime, 16.2GB and only 3 errors so far on the NIC. The thinkpad is running great, so I think I'll just stick to this.