Installation Issues on Gigabyte B660M DS3H with Realtek 2.5GbE LAN Chip and TP-Link NIC

chang

I attempted to install the Netgate-installer-amd64.img.gz on my Gigabyte B660M DS3H DDR4 motherboard, which has an inbuilt NIC with a Realtek 2.5GbE LAN chip and an additional TP-Link TX201 2.5 Gigabit PCIe Network Adapter. During the installation process, I encountered the error message: "Cannot connect to installer daemon." Additionally, upon checking the logs at /var/log/daemon.log, I found entries stating "Cannot calculate the system NDI, failed to load the system settings."

stephenw10

Hmm, interesting. Is it detecting both NICs correctly? Does it show a valid MAC address for each in the boot logs? Or from ifconfig at the shell after it fails?

If one of them is not correctly reporting a MAC that could be an issue though I've never seen that failure mode locally.

chang

@stephenw10
Before installing pfSense, I was using Ubuntu 22.04, and both of my NICs were working fine. Following your suggestion, I checked ifconfig, and it's not showing a MAC address for either NIC. I also reviewed the logs in /var/log/messages, and found some interesting entries:

iwi_monitor: if you agree to the license, set legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1 in /boot/loader.conf
PCI0: <serial bus> at device 25.0 (no driver attached)
PCI2: <network, ethernet> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
PCI3: <network, ethernet> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)

It seems like both network interfaces are not being recognized or initialized properly by the system.

chang

@stephenw10
Before installing pfSense, I was using Ubuntu 22.04, and both of my NICs were working fine. Following your suggestion, I checked ifconfig, and it's not showing a MAC address for either NIC. I also reviewed the logs in /var/log/messages, and found some interesting entries:

iwi_monitor: if you agree to the license, set legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1 in /boot/loader.conf
PCI0: <serial bus> at device 25.0 (no driver attached)
PCI2: <network, ethernet> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
PCI3: <network, ethernet> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)

It seems like both network interfaces are not being recognized or initialized properly by the system.

stephenw10

Hmm, the ifconfig output shows the interfaces present but with no MACs listed?

That would be very odd. I expect to see something like:

[24.11-RELEASE][admin@apu.stevew.lan]/root: ifconfig
re0: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>
	ether 00:0d:b9:37:30:10
	inet6 fe80::20d:b9ff:fe37:3011%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,master>)
	status: active
	nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
re1: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>
	ether 00:0d:b9:37:30:11
	inet 172.21.16.19 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.21.16.255
	inet6 fe80::20d:b9ff:fe37:3011%re1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,master>)
	status: active
	nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

The Net Installer should see those NICs correctly. They do require a newer re driver than 2.7.2.

chang

Thanks! @stephenw10 I was finally able to install pfSense using a USB-to-Ethernet adapter. The issue was that I had to install the missing realtek-re-kmod driver.