Problem with Intel Pro 1000

Pinguincommander

Hello together,
i am building a firewall based in an i3 6100 and a h110 mainboard from ASRock.
I got an Intel Pro because i read that they are supported but now, this card dpesnt Seen to work with the mainboard. The LEDs blink once when i Boot the PC, but thats all.
Pfsense says no card recognized and also when booting a Linux live system it doesnt Seen to work.

Any way to geht this working? It seems, according to other posts, tha the card only works with pcie 1.0a not with pcie 3.0

Also an other idea which cards work well with pfsense, so i could get one of those?

Thanks in Advance

Pinguincommander

Oh and i forgot.
Are there different versions of the Intel pro 1000?
Mine States PT at the end dies that make any difference?

whosmatt

PCI-E 1.0 is fine for a dual or quad port card at x4. If you go a little newer to something like the Intel 82580 chipset (Example card HP-NC365T) you'll get a bump up to PCI-E 2.0 and some power savings but probably no performance benefit to speak of. But those cards are available cheap in the refurb market. Newer still would be the i350 chipset but those are still a tad more expensive since they're still the current generation of hardware.

All of the Intel cards from the Pro 1000 era 82571EB chipset up to the current i350 are well-supported in pfSense and are the go-to cards that are recommended over and over on this and other boards.

But back to your original question; probably you just have a bum card. Test it in another mainboard or test another card in your ASRock to find out for sure. Good luck!.

Pinguincommander

Year the Card didn‘t work on another mainboard too.
But i really cant verify if its the Card or if it is a general incompatibility.
I’m afraid to buy another one and have the Same one.

But thanks for the information, so i will Stick to intel.

Thanks a lot.

provels

I suspect dead card. Bought used I'm assuming?

Pinguincommander

@provels

Yeah seems like that.
I bought it for 10 bucks.
I ordered another one this time 1000VT which Wolfs perfectly.
Thanks for your help guys.

TekNacion

Hello. Please let me know if you ever got the Pro 1G Quad card to work. I've installed a similar card (PEG4GIL) and pfSense/FreeBSD did not recognize it. I tried to install the driver from Intel but this was a nightmare with errors constantly popping up when trying to install so I gave up.

TekNacion

@whosmatt Hello. I have a PEG4IL with an 82571EB controller. I installed in an HP Proliant DL360 G5. Did a fresh installation of pfSensen 2.4.5 Stable and the card was not recognized. I downloaded the driver from Intel's website and realized that installing a driver in FreeBSD's installation of pfSense is a nightmare. Needless to say I gave up. So, I performed a clean installation Windows 10 on the same hardware and the card was recognized in Device Manager.

When you say "All of the Intel cards from the Pro 1000 era 82571EB chipset up to the current i350 are well-supported in pfSense and are the go-to cards that are recommended over and over on this and other boards." Do you that they should be recognized and installed with no further actions? Please explain.

Also, Please tell me where I may find detailed documentation on how to install Network Card drivers in pfSense.

I need to know what Quad Port network card can be used with pfSense without having to deal with manual installation of drivers.

Thanks

whosmatt

@TekNacion I am not familiar with that particular card; what does the output of pciconf -lv look like? Quad port cards I've used include the HP NC-364T and NC-365T. Both of those are recognized without issue; the former with the 'em' driver and the latter with 'igb'.

For the pciconf output, a properly recognized card should look something like:

em3@pci0:4:0:1: class=0x020000 card=0x7044103c chip=0x105e8086 rev=0x06 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
    device     = '82571EB/82571GB Gigabit Ethernet Controller D0/D1 (copper applications)'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

TekNacion

@whosmatt Thank you for the reply. I am extremely new to pfSense. Hence, I'm not familiar with drivers em nor igb or how to tell pfSense to use them. Please explain. The pfSense Book does not mention how to implement drivers em nor igb or any other. How do I go about generating the output for pciconf?

whosmatt

There's nothing to implement; it should just work. To run pciconf, the easiest way is to log in to the console on your pfsense box, choose option 8 for a shell (command prompt) and then type 'pciconf -lv' and hit enter.

TekNacion

@whosmatt So, if the card is not recognized then the card is not sopported? Although, 87571EB is in the list of supported cards for FreeBSD. I have two identical cards and no luck with either. Before purchasing another set of cards I need to know, for sure, which ones "will just work".

Pinguincommander

Hey,

@TekNacion
to answer your question
i just bought another one.
It seems mine was dead.
It did not get recognized on an linux live boot nor in the bios.

Regards.
Pinguin.

whosmatt

If I were purchasing on a budget i'd buy used HP NC-365T. If money isn't an issue buy the newer NC-366T. Both of those cards will appear in pfSense as igb0, igb1,igb2,igb3. You say you're using a DL-360G5; that should have two Broadcom ports on the motherboard that will work fine as well. They should show up as bce0 and bce1.

TekNacion

@whosmatt Yes, the two onboard NICs show up just fine. I would like a quad port because I have a static subnet fo 5 public IP addresses I will NATing to 5 separate private subnets. I know I can use Virtual IP for all 5 public IP addresses on one WAN Interface. But I don't know yet it is possible to configure Virtual IP for the 5 private subnets on the one LAN interface. I'm still looking.

stephenw10

You would use VLANs to have 5 subnets on one NIC, or at least you should, if you were doing it that way.

The igb drivers, which are compiled into the pfSense kernel, will only attach tp PCI devices they recognise so we need the PCI vendor and device IDs from those Silicom NICs to know if they will work.
Silicom NICs often have additional features like lan-bypass which mean they rely on their own drivers. That particular card does not appear to though. The drivers download just links to Intel's driver, I would expect it to work.

Steve

TekNacion

Thank you guys, very much. All your suggestions and comments really helped me get familiar with pfSense. I'm starting to question why I went such a long time avoiding it.

The NC-365T card came in and pfSense recognized it right away. But before it came in I had already learned how to use VLANs for the multiple internal subnets. Now I believe that VLANs is the best solution. It saves ports on the switch. Plus, the bottleneck is still the going to be the WAN connection and not the single Trunk port for all the subnets. I also learned how to use Virtual IP addresses for my static IP subnet on my WAN. In my opinion, pfSense rocks.

I will be using the NC-365T on my Hyper-V Server to separate NAS devices and shared printers into different VLANs.