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.