Jetway NC9C-550-LF with an 4 NIC daughterboard

Zflash76

I'm looking to expand my Pfsense 2.1 router with a Jetway daughterboard. The current setup that I have is:

Jetway NC9C-550-LF Motherboard http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_view.asp?productid=781&proname=NC9C-550-LF
2GB SODIMM
250GB HD

The idea is that I want to expand the router in order to retire my switch. Everything at home is connected with a Gigabit connection, so the current daughterboards are (hopefully) eligible:

I have a couple of questions because I cannot find anything solid on the net:

Can these boards be used on the NC9C-550-LF Motherboard?
Do they work within PFSense 2.1 (recognized)?
Is the Atom Pineview N550 powerful enough to fill the entire bandwidth of the 5 ports (the MB has 2 onboard nics already)?

Some additional info:

Everything is on one subnet.
I have a server with 5 VM's incl. downloading instances
A synology DS209
GoogleTV
Main PC
Bunch of mobile devices which connect through an AP.

stephenw10

I believe that board can use the 3 NIC daughter boards. They are PCI where as the 4 NIC versions are PCIe.

They are all supported by pfSense 2.1 but always go Intel if you can.

You will never be able to max out 4 NICs with that combination for several reasons. They are all PCI NICs and are probably all on the same bus. The PCI bus can pass ~1333Mbps (32bit 33MHz) so 5 1000Mbps NICs has no chance. However you will never see that barrier as the N550 can only pass ~500Mbps of firewall/NAT.

Steve

Zflash76

Thanks for the info. I contacted Jetway and they told me the pretty much the same. The ADE3INLANG is the board that will fit, but they use 3 PCI lanes for the 3 nics. In theory that will do the trick but the bottleneck will be the CPU. It turns out it cannot handle the load at all.

I stripped away this idea and just go out for fairly good network components like the Managed Netgear GS108t-200 or the TP-Link TL-SG3210 It's almost the same price.

stephenw10

I don't think they can be on seperate PCI buses because there aren't enough pins on the header. :-\ There are other users here who have probably posted dmesg output that would tell you for sure.

Also a dredged up the wrong figure for bus bandwidth, it's 133MBps or 1064Mbps.

Anyway I agree that if you're just trying to replace a switch a newer switch with VLANs will be cheaper, easier and ~~just as fast~~ faster.

Steve

Zflash76

Jetway was a bit vague about this and on my follow up mail about the PCI bus, I didn't get a response. Doesn't really matter though, because it's quite clear that a Router shouldn't do a switch' task. My current HP swicthes are nominated for replacement because of the lack of VLAN (iptv) and LACP support for my Nas4Free system. It was worth a shot!

Thank you for the info!

nrgyz

Stay away from those crappy Realtek-based daughterboards. These just plain sucks. I have a setup here (pfSense 2.1-RELEASE) running on a Jetway JNF9I-2550 motherboard coupled with a ADE4RTLANG and this is giving me headaches. I think there's actually a bug in FreeBSD's RE drivers. When one interface is under heavy load, it just resets (kernel: reX: watchdog timeout)

There's no solution so far (see this thread http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,57037.15.html)

I think I'll need to order the Intel-based that are much expensive but also more reliable.

nrgyz

As for the actual question from @Zflash76

JNC9C only support Gen1 daughterboards (ADE3RTLANG and ADE3INLANG). Gen2 daughterboards (ADE4RTLAN and ADE4INLAN) are incompatible with this board.