Broadcom NIC in Dell Hardware
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I have a Dell PowerEdge 850 with two onboard Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express interfaces.
This system is currently functioning with a linux firewall and the drivers are not blacklisted.Will these work with pfSense too?
I was not able to get the older version of the 850 with the previous generation of Broadcom chipset to work.
I'm just asking here before I take the working firewall down to see if pfSense will install - if the answer is that no broadcom chipset will work I'll just skip the attempt.
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I've managed to get a few of the Dell PE series servers to run with pfSense (they're power pigs and loud to be sure, but pretty bullet proof too).
I've currently got three running 2.2.5-64 (1 from 2.15 and 2 from 2.2) and they all have bge and em interfaces.
They're not heavily loaded, but they do run multiple OpenVPN servers and clients.
They've been very solid for me.
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I have a number of the 1U pizza box, single power supply 850 model servers. All run dual core 2.8 to 3.4 dual core intel cpu, and two different sets of onboard NICs.
One set of them have a broadcom NIC that doesn't work with pfSense. The other ones work. -
Interesting, I've had no problem with the builtin Broadcom's on my boxes, most of them run as the WAN interface.
I do make a point of trying to bring those boxes up to the latest BIOS version available as they typically come as repurposed servers that haven't seen updates in forever.
Maybe I've just been lucky?
As always YMMV ;)