Problem With RealTek 8168 gigabit NIC
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Earlier I was using RealTek 8139 fast Ethernet card, everything was working fine but today i changed that card with RT 8168 and computer cannot connect to the interface using that card …
Is it the problem of incompatibility with drivers??
I am using pfsense 2.0
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Earlier I was using RealTek 8139 fast Ethernet card, everything was working fine but today i changed that card with RT 8168 and computer cannot connect to the interface using that card …
Is it the problem of incompatibility with drivers??
I am using pfsense 2.0
There may be a solution to using your card I don't know…
That being said, I generally recommend against using anything but Intel server NIC's in servers. Broadcom's NetXtreme line is usually pretty good as well. Everything else I would avoid, if you care about compatibility, uptime and stability.
My server has an on board Realtek 8111C chip. First thing I did was disable it in BIOS.
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yeah, check out the pfsense/FreeBSD 8 compatibility list on the pfsense.org site. I'd stick only to that hardware and not waste time trying to get others working.
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The 8168 should be supported by the re(4) driver even in FreeBSD 8.1.
What is the exact model number and version of the NIC?The older 10/100 Realtek NICs were really not good under FreeBSD but the gigabit NICs seem much better. IMHO!
You could try one of the early FreeBSD 8.3 based builds to test new hardware support:
http://iserv.nl/files/pfsense/releng83/
Bare in mind that these are for testing only!Steve
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Well pfsense detects it as Realtek 8186/8111 gigabit Ethernet card..
Just want to add .. in actuall I have 5 nics installed 3 of them are 10/100 … What I was trying to do there is using one gigabit card as LAN and load balancing with other 4 ... Can this setup create any issue ... -
There should be no problem with that setup.
Steve
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thanks for support guys … I am looking forward to buy Intel nic ...
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Hi … I just wanted to try that FreeBSD 8.3, but I am confused ... which version I should use LiveCD-2.0.2 or LiveCD-2.1??
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Well since both are built on 8.3 it shouldn't matter which one you use to test for newer drivers. However I belive 2.1 is the latest pfSense code where as 2.0.2 is the older code built on FreeBSD 8.3. I could be wrong!
Other people who are testing this are using 2.1.
Steve
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Hi …
I installed 2.1 but with same old results... pfsense is detecting the card but when i assign interface to the NIC ... i just cannot access that particular interface ...(( -
So it's still detects it as an 8186/8111 when in fact it's a 8168?
Any errors in the logs?
Steve
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Sorry I can't post log now …
Yesterday I changed the whole setup ... changed motherboard and other stuff earlier I was using quite new motherboard so there were 2 PCI slots ... and 2 PCI-E but I couldn't find any compatible PCI-E card nearby stores ... so that's why I switched to this motherboard, now I have 6 PCI NICS all working fine. But I just want to confirm this setup for about 100 computer, main purpose of pfsense will be load balancing and I want to monitor bandwidth of every user on the network ... no vpn ... just DHCP serverMy configuration:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
RAM 2 GB
5 PCI WAN (10/100) + 1 PCI Gigabit LAN
Pfsense will work like this:
50 Mbps * 5 WANs -->> Gigabit LAN --->> Gigabit Switch
I believe this can shoot the internet bandwidth up to 250 Mbps used by 90 to 100 computersCan this configuration handle this setup ???
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The number of clients is not really a factor, especially in your case where they are all on one interface so there is no need to route between LAN subnets.
I would say that a 2.4GHz P4 should be able to easily sustain 250Mbps throughput with the load balancing over head.
Monitoring the bandwidth of individual users is a widely discussed topic on the forum. There are several packages to do it (bandwidthd) but many users seem to ask for a more comprehensive solution. Try it and see.Steve
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Thanks very much for the feedback Steve … I really appreciate !!
I have tried Bandwidthd ... I couldn't make it work properly. Then I tried ntop it worked, but i am not sure whether configured it correctly or not, as this pfsense is quite new to me and I don't know much about the networking stuff!!I am on version 2.0.1, bandwidthd and ntop are not fully supported with this version??
I want to block users from communicate with each other, I just want that users should not be visible in Windows network ... is it possible on same subnet with my setup??
And I will surely checkout this topic on forum... -
Traffic between clients on the same subnet does not go through pfSense so it's not possible to block it. You would have to use individual interfaces per client, not really practical even with vlans.
I don't use bandwidthd so I can't comment. It would be better to start a new thread in the packages sub forum anyway, this thread is now way off topic. ;)
Steve
