Best NIC for PfSense?
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Also a +1 on the Intel cards, I actually make it a rule for anyone who wants to set up a box that no matter what other parts go in it's an intel chip nic, (be it HP/ DELL / Hotlava branded etc) because the drivers are rock solid and they give great performance without the weirdness you sometimes get with other cards.
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@CC:
Also a +1 on the Intel cards, I actually make it a rule for anyone who wants to set up a box that no matter what other parts go in it's an intel chip nic, (be it HP/ DELL / Hotlava branded etc) because the drivers are rock solid and they give great performance without the weirdness you sometimes get with other cards.
It almost seems like you didn't read the original post.
The intel nic fetish is a bit over the top here–they simply aren't the only manufacturer who can produce a simple nic. Given that 3 different chipsets failed, I'd begin to suspect a problem with the system itself; one wonky capacitor can make the whole thing flake out.
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Realtek is unfixable junk. As for various OEM spin-offs of Intel, the trouble is that the OEM often screw up the whole thing with their "improvements" (or are outright crippling the NICs when compared to the non-OEM variant with the same chipset).
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Realtek is unfixable junk.
Except for the fact that for non-fanboys they work fine. Yeah, it's possible that every single nic that he tried was just junk that doesn't meet your high standards, but I'd still suspect the thing they're getting plugged into. The constant anti-rtl drumbeat on this board defies the reality that there are tens of millions of the things deployed and working fine, without mysterious disconnects or other phantoms that people here would argue are absolutely inevitable due to the fundamentally non-working nature of every chipset realtek has ever produced. (And any problem with an intel nic is quickly explained away.)
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Yup. They work great. Ask the PC Engines guy what they think about Realtek.
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It almost seems like you didn't read the original post.
The intel nic fetish is a bit over the top here–they simply aren't the only manufacturer who can produce a simple nic. Given that 3 different chipsets failed, I'd begin to suspect a problem with the system itself; one wonky capacitor can make the whole thing flake out.
Read it but the OP was asking on what people thought would be the best NIC, now many people may have a lot of luck with a verity of network cards from whatever vendor they may choose from but having several PFsense boxes in work production as well as mine at home (and my goto recommendation for friends who want to roll one out) is stick with Intel chipsets.
So yeah while the original post kind of meanders into troubleshooting a bit, I did reply to the topic subject " Best NIC for PfSense?" ;)
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@CC:
So yeah while the original post kind of meanders into troubleshooting a bit, I did reply to the topic subject " Best NIC for PfSense?" ;)
The original poster already tried an intel chipset, and you just told him to try an intel chipset. If you want to speak to what NIC is most reliable then I guess the advice should speak to the prevalence of counterfeit parts and the importance of making sure that you're sourcing quality parts, and then name a specific nic. A grey market intel nic with dodgy components isn't any better than a cut-rate realtek with dodgy components. (Except that on this board you might get castigated for getting the too-cheap intel nic off ebay, but the too-cheap realtek will be written off as "all realteks are the same and none of them can possibly work".) So if the goal is to buy one more nic to see if that's the problem the advice would be to buy an i350-T2 at full retail from a reliable supplier. It should run about $140. If that one flakes out also, it's the system not the nics.
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So, which part of plain Intel (no OEM) is unclear? And yeah, there's no "grey market" with Realtek NICs, because noone wants to fake something that's already a complete crap from the very beginning.
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Yup. They work great. Ask the PC Engines guy what they think about Realtek.
Interestingly, the only NIC I've had unexplained flakiness with in the past several years is the i210 in the apu2. I suspect maybe something they missed in the initialization in the firmware because their firmware support has been generally lousy. I never had any problems with the rtls in the apu1 (except that I think they never did release a firmware fix to get the speed indicator lights working usefully), or with i2xxs on other platforms. I'd also suspect it was worth it to them to spend an extra couple of bucks on intel chips just to stop all the whining they got from fanboys about the realteks.
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Definitely. All those complaints about Realtek were from Intel fanboys, while actually there was no real problem with them, whatsoever… The OP having the NICs die on him on a daily basis is also a perfect reason to recommend Realtek as the best option.
Out of this retarded debate.
::) ::) ::)
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Definitely. All those complaints about Realtek were from Intel fanboys, while actually there was no real problem with them, whatsoever… The OP having the NICs die on him on a daily basis is also a perfect reason to recommend Realtek as the best option.
It's almost as though the OP didn't write that 2 of the 3 chipsets he was having problems with were not realtek. (Or maybe fanboys have selective reading comprehension?)
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I have no idea about stge. And I have already commented on the non-OEM multiple times, but people pushing Realtek junk clearly have selecting understanding. The card not getting properly recognized/initialized on a warm reboot would clearly suggest shitty firmware coming from the OEM. But then again, the option will obviously be Realtek. If the OP puts say 16 of them in there, leaving most of them unused, chances are that only the unused ones will actually die on him, so it should minimize the forced reboots.
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I have no idea about stge.
Clearly.
The card not getting properly recognized/initialized on a warm reboot would clearly suggest shitty firmware coming from the OEM.
Or a flaky pcie bus, which would also explain random hangs at runtime with three different chipsets. But I understand that anything that implies that spending enough money on the right intel nic isn't a magical solution to any problem or that any other kind of nic might actually work must be suspect.
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Yep. Every thread asking about recommended NICs should be closed with "Buy Realtek".
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Yep. Every thread asking about recommended NICs should be closed with "Buy Realtek".
You've certainly proven my point about there being a weird, irrational, monomaniacal phobia about a particular manufacturer's products running through this board. What's really interesting is that I never even suggested buying another realtek, I just pointed out that there are other things to look at than the nic. Sorry if that caused brain hurt.
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And now for something completely different.
So, this is my question: which is the most reliable NIC for PfSense?
Oh wait, that was the original question, before the Realtek squad took over the thread. ::)
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Or a flaky pcie bus, which would also explain random hangs at runtime with three different chipsets. But I understand that anything that implies that spending enough money on the right intel nic isn't a magical solution to any problem or that any other kind of nic might actually work must be suspect.
Fair comment; the OP (who's thread has been hijecked at this point) might have something else up that's manifesting as network problems (I've even seen switches be the root cause in the past) but while there are other vendors out there who's mileage may vary, given the maturity of the drivers (one of BSD's weaker points), and the stability of the hardware at this point it's difficult to NOT recommend the intel cards when someone asks. (and they are typically cited as the goto on unraid forums (unraid runs on nanobsd))
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This is the kind of thing that makes me go nuts on this forum.
People come in here and want to get attention with their problems at the most basic level.
(excluding netgate products of course)If you didn't do your troubleshooting to get all the way to "oh it must be software" why are you even asking in here?
DO the work first instead of wasting the time of people. Oh and even pissing off some of us in the process.
"What is the best nic for pfsense" is clearly answered in the GD book.
Yeah we assume stuff on this board. We assumed you are competent enough to do your own troubleshooting if you're building your own systems. We assume you've established that your problem is with pfsense through troubleshooting otherwise you'd be on another vendor's board posting shit.
All of a sudden there's blowback because there's some Realtek fans in the house and don't like that the forumers routinely bash them.
This must be hell, the same week people are defending Realtek and Leslie Jones is pushing to be in Deadpool 2. Man wtf is going on? Realtek's ethernet devices have been a scourge for however long. They have a crab logo for cryin out loud. A CRAB. -
realtek is poor on FreeBSD (which is what pfsense uses).
I recommend on realtek nic's to disable offloading which should make them stable but they still wont scale as well to higher loads as intel cards, since intel has tunable interrupt moderation etc.
The realtek issues are bad enough in that I invested around £50 in a mini pcie addon card for my NUC so I could get 2 intel ports.
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Realtek sucks, their so called "gigabit" nics can barely reach half that with twice as much cpu usage as an intel nic doing actual 1gbps.
I hate intel for a variety of reasons but they make way better nics than realtek, although they aren't the only game in town.Anyone who hasn't ever heard of more nic oem's than realtek and intel is simply clueless, off the top of my head mellanox, cavium, solarflare - to name a few but Intel is AFAIK the only company that has widely available modern 1gbps ethernet cards whereas for 10gbps there is the above, mellanox connectx2 can be had for only $10-30 for instance which is a great deal for 10gbe)
Intel i350 (best modern chipset):
You can get a 4 port whitebox reference design (made with a real intel ASIC) for around $50 on fleabay.
The "OEM" unbranded whitebox ones are fine, I have had mine for over a year and it works just as good as the real thing there isn't any reason to spend five times as much if you're using this at home and not a business mission critical environment.
Keep in mind the genuine one is made in china too.I am a paranoid person but I do not think there is a backdoor, people buying these aren't sticking them in anything important so it isn't worth spending millions to do this and not simply do it to the intel fab itself vs just some gray market ebay shit.
It supports SR-IOV with flexi-ports, whereas the older generation such as gigabit ET series you couldn't assign a single port to a VM you had to do two at a time.
Intel Gigabit ET (older):
Server pulls around $10 for dual port on ebay, sr-iov that doesn't have flexi-port partitioning.Intel PRO/1000PT (very old):
No virtualization, but you can get a 6 port silicom for $10 on ebay.