Making my Znyx ZX346Q nic to work

stephenw10

If the NIC were in fact still completely inactive I would expect to see some packets going out but not any received.
If you have setup a dhcp server on dc0 at 192.168.4.20 and when you connect a client to it it receives an address then the NIC is working and the problem lies elsewhere.

You definitely proved your cross-over cables with some thing else?

Steve

vishibalo

im not sure how to set up a dhcp server on dc0, do you mean make it in to a WAN port or activate dhcp in the interface menue in gui. Not sure what im reading here
@stephenw10:

If you have setup a dhcp server on dc0 at 192.168.4.20

i basically dont understand the question or what i would do to answer that, troubleshoot that.

as for the crossover cable i am at a bit of a loss, do i need to use a crossover cable? my workstation has 2 gigabit ports, on the other hand the znyx card has 4 10/100baseTX ports, would my gigabit port take care of the crossover problem or do i still need to use a crossover cable for the card, to access my webgui via fxp0 im using a straight through cable, if i do have to have a crossover cable, i will have one made and tested.

stephenw10

Ok so you have dc0 assigned as LAN4 (?) with an IP address of 192.168.4.20/24.
The pfSense box will not act as a DHCP server on that interface unless to configure it to do so.
Go to Services: DHCP Server: and click on the LAN4 tab. Now check the 'enable DHCP server' box and enter a valid range. For example: 192.168.4.50-192.168.4.100. Click save and apply.

You wouldn't normally need a cross over cable since your Gigabit interface are almost certainly auto-MDX. However if you have manually specified 100MbpsFD (disabling auto-negotiation) are they still auto-MDX? I don't know. If you had two 100Mbps NICs you would need to use a cross-over cable. It's not certain whether or not you might need one so try both if you have them. Normally you would not see any link lights if the cable is wrong though.

Steve

vishibalo

Ok, I did as instructed, I set up dc0 as per example, i pluged my laptop to pfsense box, and checked the network, it did get an IP (although it is completely different from the pfsense IP 169.254.xx.xx) also mentions that it is a self assigned IP amd will not be able to connect to internet. as for packages, it did show minimal transfer in and out.

also I have a question, what is the point of setting up a LAN port as a DHCP server?

stephenw10

Like you found 169.254.X.X are self assigned IPs. That is done when the dhcp client, in a Windows box, can't find a DHCP server. So it was not able to talk to the pfSense box at all. :(

@vishibalo:

what is the point of setting up a LAN port as a DHCP server?

If you have a DHCP server running on your LAN interface then you can connect almost any client machine and it will just work. That includes all types of computer but also printers, set-top boxes etc.

We may be getting close to the end of the road here. It seems odd that you are seeing link lights but no data is flowing. Do the lights you're seeing make sense? Are they showing 100MbpsFD? One thing you could try is to run a packet capture on, say, dc0 and the connect the client. Then we could see what packets are being sent/received.

Steve

vishibalo

Ok so something I was looking at, I don't know if it means anything or matters, but my machine recognizes the NIC interfaces as dc(4), while I was looking at HCL, it lists that card under de(4) driver support. ZNYX ZX3xx. Does that change anything? Is there something wrong with my machine? or my install?

stephenw10

Hmm, well it's at least unexpected. Reading through the complete thread on the freebsd mailing list I linked to earlier they exepcted it to be the de(4) driver too.
Please give the output of:

pciconf -lv | grep 20000

Another suggestion in the FreeBSD thread was that the PHY is in fact unsupported so it remains in whatever it's default mode is. You might try setting your client machine to whatever modes it can and see it that connects (10Mbps FD, 100Mbps HD etc).

@http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=de&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+10.0-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html:

Some cards are explicitly programmed to a particular media type by a set-up utility and are not changeable.

Steve

vishibalo

@stephenw10:

Hmm, well it's at least unexpected. Reading through the complete thread on the freebsd mailing list I linked to earlier they exepcted it to be the de(4) driver too.
Please give the output of:
pciconf -lv | grep 20000
Another suggestion in the FreeBSD thread was that the PHY is in fact unsupported so it remains in whatever it's default mode is. You might try setting your client machine to whatever modes it can and see it that connects (10Mbps FD, 100Mbps HD etc).

@http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=de&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+10.0-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html:

Some cards are explicitly programmed to a particular media type by a set-up utility and are not changeable.

I was looking at that thread a while back and when i looked up ZNYX website for product description, they mention.

Channel Speeds Ethernet/Fast Ethernet: 10/100 or 20/200 per channel in full-duplex
mode (IEEE Auto Negotiation)

this is what it mentions under the channel speeds, im not sure if that means because its under auto negotiation that I have to set it to 10/100 because I'm setting both sides on manual or if there is anything else.
I will play around with it trying to set it to other speeds to see if that yields any results, as for now I still don't understand why it pulls the card under a different driver.

Attached is a image of pciconf -lv hopefully that will give you some ideas.

![pciconf -lv.png](/public/imported_attachments/1/pciconf -lv.png)
![pciconf -lv.png_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/pciconf -lv.png_thumb)

stephenw10

Ok, so the chips used in the card are given as 0x00191011. 1011 is the PCI vendoir ID for DEC and 0019 is the 21143 NIC. That is listed as a supported model in the dc(4) driver:

@http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/8.3.0/sys/dev/dc/if_dcreg.h?revision=234063&view=markup:

/*

DEC PCI vendor ID
*/
#define DC_VENDORID_DEC 0x1011

/*

DEC/Intel 21143 PCI device ID
#define DC_DEVICEID_21143 0x0019

That same chip is also listed by the de(4) driver though here it's listed as a 21142:
@http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/8.3.0/sys/dev/de/dc21040reg.h?revision=234063&view=markup:

#define DEC_VENDORID 0x1011
#define CHIPID_21040 0x0002
#define CHIPID_21140 0x0009
#define CHIPID_21041 0x0014
#define CHIPID_21142 0x0019

Can you see what chip it's actually using?

Interestingly looking at the build instructions for the Znyx FreeBSD driver, now very out of date, it says you must remove the dc and de drivers from the kernel. Presumably this is because all three would otherwise try to claim the device.
Perhaps there's a way of disabling the dc driver to allow the de driver to have a go? Hmm, I've not needed to try before. It might be possible to override the in kernel dc driver with one compiled specially to not recognise the chip. Hmm.

Steve

vishibalo

I would say its using 21143-PD, but I am not sure if I am looking at the right thing. I have the picture provided, it should tell you what it has.

How complicated is it to remove drivers from a kernel? and would it be necessary?

Also, somewhat off topic, how do you get out of Shell? Every time I use Shell option I can not get out of it.

photo.JPG_thumb

stephenw10

Nice photo. :) Yep definitely 21143-PD.

Type 'exit' to get back to the menu from the CLI shell.

Recompiling the kernel to remove drivers is not hard if you've already got a build environment setup. I don't.

It would be better to try to prevent the dc drive attaching somehow. If you rebuild the kernel you're likely to have to repeat the process at each pfSense update which could become tiresome pretty quickly!

One thing you haven't tried yet is running a 2.2 snapshot. They are built on FreeBSD 10 and having many, many driver changes. They are still in alpha it the moment so there might be some other nasty surprises but if the interfaces behave differently then at least you might be able to use them under 2.2 when it's released.

Steve

vishibalo

i would give it a try, anything at this point. how would i get a 2.2 snapshot?

stephenw10

http://snapshots.pfsense.org/

Check the 2.2 subforum to make sure there aren't report of some new catastrophic bug in the latest snapshot and give it a try.

Steve

vishibalo

I tried giving 2.2 a shot… no luck, my comp will not recognize live CD install, just gives me "Disk boot failure" message on screen. I tried different versions of it and using iso.gz files with no luck either. Ran out of CD's to burn (only had a few left), and my comp will not do flashdrive.

I figure that I will get a 5 port Asus server board and a Xeon cpu, probably will solve all the problems I am having now. But that is way in the future.