Biostar TH61-ITX and PCI-e NIC's
-
As a last ditch effort, I decided to post this question here. I’m trying to repurpose a no longer used mini-ITX computer for pfSense. The motherboard is an Biostar TH61-ITX with an i5 CPU, 6GB RAM, a single onboard LAN, one card slot (PCIe), and the latest BIOS update.
My issue is I can’t get any PCIe NIC’s to function in any operating systems with this motherboard. I’ve tried both a Supermicro-AOC-SG-i2 and a HP NC360T. The cards fail to function correctly with the motherboard in pfSense (FreeBSD), Windows 10, and Fedora Linux. I know the cards are good as I can get them to work on similarly aged ASUS in pfSense and Fedora without any needed configurations or tweaks.
On the Biostar TH61-ITH, the cards seemingly are correctly detected and identified (make, model, features, etc.) under all three O/S’s. The logs seem to indicate both cards are ready and functional. The O/S's correctly identifies the MAC addresses. The LED indicators on the cards illuminate when I plug in the cables as expected, but the operating systems indicate the network cable are disconnected. If I up and down the interfaces the LED light illuminate and go off as expected. The cards won't get a DHCP address. Still no traffic when I try assigning static address.
I tried repeatedly resetting BIOS, and somewhat less systematically tweaking BIOS settings relating to the PCI-e slot, on-board LAN, on-board graphics, etc. Nothing has made any difference.
I’m waiting for a follow-up response from Biostar support, but don’t expect a solution from them. I’m guessing this is a lost cause. The BIOS may simply not these (older) PCIe NIC’s or perhaps there is something wrong with the PCIe slot.
Anyway, I thought I’d see if anyone had any suggestions before I discard the motherboard.
Thanks,
-
In case it helps…
Motherboard Details
http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=548Thanks again,
-
Biostar's technical support was of little to no help. This morning I finally decided to cut my losses (time-wise) and trashed the TH61-ITX motherboard and i5-2400 CPU. I ordered a newer Gigabyte Mini-ITX motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU from Newegg. Life's short. :-\
Consider this thread closed… Thanks to all who read it.
-
Hmm, strange issue.
Normally if it wasn't working I would not expect it to show up under pciconf correctly. If it does I would suspect a driver issue maybe but to see it fail in three OSes sure looks like some obscure hardware incompatibility.
None the less you might try a FreeBSD 12 snapshot if you can that has newer drivers.
Steve
-
"Cable Disconnected" seems to signal a RJ45/cable/MDIX issue, but nah, it cannot be that simple.
