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    Cheap Quad Port Gigabit NICs that Work With pfSense?

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    • S
      spiritfly
      last edited by

      I just finished my initial tests with pfSense and I decided it is the way to go. Now I need to choose myself 2 good quad gigabit nics for cheap.

      Since I'm not in the US my options are kinda limited from ebay and there are no rooms for mistakes. Can you suggest some models which work with pfsense for sure?

      Thank you!

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      • J
        jasonlitka
        last edited by

        Do you really need 8 NICs?  Can you use vLANs instead?

        If not, I'd recommend these:

        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106129

        The cheap Chinese variants you see on eBay for $100 MAY work but also may not.  There are posts on here from people going each way.

        I can break anything.

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        • M
          mortem
          last edited by

          Hi,

          Search for a 4-port Intel 82583v. It manages jumbo packets and should not too expensive on Ebay, imho :)

          PM

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          • J
            jasonlitka
            last edited by

            @mortem:

            Hi,

            Search for a 4-port Intel 82583v. It manages jumbo packets and should not too expensive on Ebay, imho :)

            PM

            I don't know of any reputable company that made a quad-port 82583v card.  That chip was designed for embedded devices and small form-factor computers where power consumption was at a premium, not multi-port servers.  Any such quad card would need to be 4 individual 82583v chips behind a PCI-e switch.

            I can break anything.

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            • A
              Atlantisman
              last edited by

              I have used these in some ESXi builds:

              http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-436431-001-LFF-long-bracket-only-Quad-PORT-PCI-EXPRESS-NIC-NC364T-/271563819719?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item3f3a770ac7

              Very awesome, inexpensive cards. They are based on the Intel 82571EB chip.

              You can find these surplus in many places(not just ebay), they were in quite a few HP servers a while back so many of the cards are still floating around.

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              • M
                mortem
                last edited by

                @Jason:

                @mortem:

                Hi,

                Search for a 4-port Intel 82583v. It manages jumbo packets and should not too expensive on Ebay, imho :)

                PM

                I don't know of any reputable company that made a quad-port 82583v card.  That chip was designed for embedded devices and small form-factor computers where power consumption was at a premium, not multi-port servers.  Any such quad card would need to be 4 individual 82583v chips behind a PCI-e switch.

                Oups, my bad. I appology  ;D

                One question for the card spiritfly needs: which connector: PCIe, PCI-X?

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                • T
                  toomeek
                  last edited by

                  Hello, is this card supported under pfSense?
                  http://ark.intel.com/products/49187/Intel-Gigabit-ET2-Quad-Port-Server-Adapter
                  It's based on Intel 82576.
                  I'm asking because we had serious problems under standard Linux kernel.. we had to replace driver to manufacturer's version..
                  But it was long time ago (2012 or something). I belive same could happen for pfSense - driver fault.

                  Because of this thread I want You ask:
                  is it possible to create single LAG/Team/PortChannel over 2 stacked Cisco switches (2 ports per switch, true stack) and use it to provide multiple VLAN channels (eg. Internet traffic, Management, LAN traffic, guest traffic..)?
                  This will increase availability and overall throughput for the router.
                  We managed to push over 370MB/s from this card.. but it could be more.

                  Did someone deployed such config?

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