Intel D2500CC does not support Hardware VLAN tagging

frater

I recently bought 2 Intel D2500CC motherboards so I could replace another one that broke down.
The D2500CC looked ideal as it doesn't need forced cooling and has 2 NICs.
I bought 2 because I need to be able to replace it if it breaks down.

On the LAN NIC I have 35 VLANs and on the WAN I have 5 VLANs
I had to use an old Celeron system before I had this Intel D2500CC running.

Getting the Intel D2500CC to run took a long time. Somehow the VLANs stopped working just before pfsense fully boots. I had a feeling it had to do something with hardware vlan tagging, but it took me a long time before I found the command to turn this off.
After I executed "ifconfig em0 -vlanhwtag" the vlans started working again.

Can we have an option in the webif to turn this off, just like checksum offloading?

I now have to resort to a cronjob to turn it off http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,48155.15.html

I would rather know more why this is happening, but this option is a good start.
I also switched to the 2.1 development edition in the hope it would solve the problem (before I found the solution). It would be nice to get it in there before the release.

dhatz

Thanks for reporting this.

It would be interesting to know whether this issue also occurs with other Intel desktop boards e.g. D2700 …

frater

@dhatz:

Thanks for reporting this.

It would be interesting to know whether this issue also occurs with other Intel desktop boards e.g. D2700 …

Does this mean something will be done about it?

And is there also a chance that the problem with the video driver gets solved in 2.1?
This patch then needs to be backported to FreeBSD:
http://freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/r237203

splmachine

I too just picked up a the D2500CCE and waiting for delivery… I'd like to know if the video issue with 64bit was fixed. I do recall seeing another post stating you can run through the 32bit install and just use those answers when installing 64. (Of course, the fix would be better if available!)

frater

The video issue is there with 32-bits

Deviant

I have also seen issues with Intel Motherboards with Intel embedded NIC's.

Intel 2700MUD motherboard with onboard Intel GigE NIC + 2 x Intel 10/100/1000 PRO don't play well with VLAN's, when enabled on any interface VLAN clients have high ping times and erratic speeds, I cannot find another explanation for this.

Previous setups with Intel mobo with realtek NIC onboard + 2 x Intel NIC's had no such problem.

jimp

That might be possible to put in as a checkbox. However, if it shows up at all it's because the card and driver claim it is supported.

If it claims to be supported but it doesn't actually work, it could either be a driver issue or an issue with the NIC's chip improperly handling the feature.

For now you can just add a shellcmd tag (manually or with the shellcmd package) to execute the ifconfig … -vlanhwtag command at bootup.

You can open up a feature request ticket on http://redmine.pfsense.org/ and request it that way.