Pfsense Installed on a Dell R320
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Hi Guys
Just wondering if anyone has installed Pfsense on a Dell R320 and if there were any issues with it?
I'm going to be adding an Intel I350 dual port Ethernet adapter to the server in addition to the two on-board ports.
Thanks
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There was someone who posted about an r320 on the mailing list a couple months ago that had problems with the NICs I think it was, but otherwise I believe that's one we've heard of people running OK.
The i350 card should work on 2.1. It may work on 2.0.x but I haven't seen any real confirmation of that.
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I didn't install one until around the time RC0 came out, it was about two weeks prior, so it was possible that it didn't work at some point earlier than that. Works now though, I've got the quad-port version in my system at home.
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Hi i350 are also built into IBM x3550 M4 and I've one running steadily for +6months now since 2.1BETA-earlierdays ;-)
The i350 has been supported since FreeBSD 8.3, though pfSense 2.1 ships drivers from 8.4 (thanks Renato Botelho how recently bumped our patches)
which includes a couple of of bugfixes. - I think it should now even support i210's which are built into some of the most recent servers. -
I have 4 of these servers (2 already setup and running in a cluster). I had to disable all on-board nics or pfsense crashes after install (right when it goes to assign nics for the first time during first boot).
Make sure you update the firmware on the hardware! I bought them about 8 months ago and the firmware caused random PCI Slot errors displayed on the LCD on the front (and a lock up of course). I updated the firmware on the previous 2 almost 2 months ago and that fixed the problems I had.
I don't use the raid cards. I just plug the drives directly into the ATA connector on the board and use gmirror software raid. The pfsense gmirror setup works great. If you reinstall over a previous install though I always got a No bootloader error. I had to zero the beginning and end of the disks to clear the MBR and gmirror header to get pfsense to boot after a reinstall a second time. (I was having the crashes and such so I was doing a lot of reinstalls with the bios issues and discovering that the onboard nic caused lockups).
I am using Intel PRO/1000 VT Quad port nics (igb driver). I use 2 cards in each server for 8 ports each. I had to increase nbclusters and set queues to 1 (haven't tested more than one yet).
How stable are the i350 Intel nics? The only reason I didn't choose them is they are not on the 8.3 hardware compatibility list. I figured even if they did show up soon they would be unstable since they would be new.
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How stable are the i350 Intel nics? The only reason I didn't choose them is they are not on the 8.3 hardware compatibility list. I figured even if they did show up soon they would be unstable since they would be new.
Mine work fine. They're actually a fairly old part (in hardware terms), the i350 was launched in 2011-Q2.
I don't see them on the 8.3R HCL but it's explicitly listed in the release notes.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.3R/relnotes-detailed.html
