Belkin F5D5055 USB NIC + Xircom Creditcard Ethernet [SOLVED]
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Hi Guys and Girls,
I have just started to experiment with pfSense as I am looking for a quality firewall.
I have an old laptop that I can use for the base system, Thinkpad R60, which is suitably spec'ed.The problem is it has one ethernet port, so I have attempted to add both a Belkin F5D5055 USB NIC + Xircom Creditcard Ethernet.
Both of these are not detected by pfSense 1.2.3 or 2.0, despite being on the FreeBSD HCL and the pfSense HCL for the Xircom.
Some users seem to be using these adaptors quite succesfully. Is there something I am missing here?I don't particularly want to build an atom setup just to use pfSense as a test system.
Any help or direction would be much appreciated!
Edit 1
To further add:pccard0: CIS too long truncating.
pccard0: No functions.The Belkin NIC lights up to show power, but then nothing.
Neither is listed as an available interface when assigning WAN and LAN.
Edit 2
For completeness:
I tested both the cardbus and the xircom card, plus the usb nic in windows and all worked well.
I also tested the laptop which returned all good results so there must be a driver issue.
I saw elsewhere on the forums about the BIOS not loading the cardbus correctly, which may be part of the problem.
USB wise i'm not sure.Cheers,
Michael -
Well there you go, got the Belkin F5D5055 USB NIC up and running.
Curently using the 2.0 Beta from the 8th of July.
About 200 billions restarts latter and it was picked up and works.
As far as I am aware nothing changed, same USB slot and everything.Best not to complain and just get on learning pfSense :)
Hope this helps someone… restart a lot!
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Besides having bad experienxes with USB-NICs
(sometimes just switch off without reason until you replug, often bad suport of basic auto-MDIX, flaky in general) they perform especially bad due to the fact, that the data has to be transmitted over the USB interface. Dont expect to push more than 30-40 mbit/s at most.
If you do have a PCMCIA slot i recommend to use NICs in there.As a very viable alternative: use VLANs and a VLAN-capable switch.
There are already pretty cheap low-port switches available.
Like this you could run everything on the built-in NIC.
(altough you are limited in the bandwidth by the parent-interface). -
I saw a lot of posts with people having bad problems with the USB Nics.
I still can't get the PCMCIA card to work, if that worked I wouldn't have to use the USB one.Luckily this is just a home system whilst I learn how to use pfsense properly, so the WAN interface is 4-8Mbits.
Once I get to grips with it, it would be put onto more suitable machines.That VLAN configuration certainly sounds like an option I will look at.
I just received a VLAN capable switch :)
