Where can I find the ralink driver for my ASUS PCE-N53 (RT2860/5592)?

[pfSense2User]

Hello everyone:

Currently on my firewall, I have 5 NICs (2x 1Gb Ethernet (1 built-in), 2x 100-BaseTx PCI, and a PCI-E x1 Wireless Card), and my PC's BIOS detects all 5 of them, however, pfSense 2.2 Beta 04-12-14 is not playing ball with my wireless card.

First off, it doesn't get detected, and when I try loading my card with a generated driver using ndiscvt and the Windows XP x64 drivers, and try to load the driver using this command:

kldload /boot/modules/rt2860.ko

I get this error:

kldload: an error occurred while loading the module. Please check dmesg(8) for more details.

I typed in dmesg, and there aren't any errors that I could find…  My old Linksys WRT320N got fully bricked on me, and my streaming and gaming consoles rely on their own network without an Antivirus, or URL/Site Blacklists.  I have 4 Ethernet cards as follows:

em0 - Intel Pro/1000 PCI: WAN
rl0 - RealTek RTL8139 PCI: LAN
rl1 - RealTek RTL8139 PCI: OPT1
re0 - RealTek RTL8111 On-Board: OPT2

Also, I don't know where the Ralink drivers are kept in the hard drive.  Are there any ways I can get my wireless card to work so that I can have my streaming/gaming devices connect to the Internet?

[stephenw10]

Please post your boot log so we can see just how undetected it is. Does ral even try?
I can find only bad news about this card though. There doesn't appear to be a mainstream Linux driver for it.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_PCE-N53

I doubt you will ever get this working in pfSense. IMHO you should cut your losses now and get a different card or an external AP.  :(

Steve

[pfSense2User]

Shoot.  Here's the boot log.

Note: The boot log text is not in separate lines, only spaced…

I did find a USB 2.0 wireless card that is supported in Linux https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Tenda_W522U

It's a dual-band Wireless card capable of running either a 2.4GHz Network, or 5GHz network (not sure if the card can do both with hostapd in one sitting, but I digress.)

bootlog.txt

[stephenw10]

FreeBSD is often some way behind Linux in driver availability so although it may happen one day it won't be anytime soon.

pci3: <network> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)</network>

I would guess that's it and nothing attempts to attach to it.

You can check that by running 'pciconf -l' at the command line.

Steve

[pfSense2User]

Running pciconf -lv:

none3@pci0:3:0:0:	class=0x028000 card=0x851a1043 chip=0x55921814 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
    class      = network

So, it detects it's a network card, but nothing else, such as type of card; you're right: FreeBSD doesn't have the drivers for this yet…

[Topper727]

@pfSense2User:

Shoot.  Here's the boot log.

Note: The boot log text is not in separate lines, only spaced…

I did find a USB 2.0 wireless card that is supported in Linux https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Tenda_W522U

It's a dual-band Wireless card capable of running either a 2.4GHz Network, or 5GHz network (not sure if the card can do both with hostapd in one sitting, but I digress.)

FYI, open with different editor.. I use Wordpad to view the log correctly.