3com 509 NICS
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I have a 3com 3c509 and a 3com 3c509B in my pile of bits. I have seen posts in here that seem to indicate that FreeBSD doesn't like the 509 cards. Is this right? Should I avoid them entirely?
Thank you
Cheers, Liam -
There have been different hardware versions of that board. Afaik not all seem to have issues. I have a bunch of 3com 509's that I never had issues with but I have also heard of different experience with them. As you have them anyway give them a go. If you have to exchange them later it's pretty simple: shut down the system, exchange the nics, poer wit up again. pfSense will detect a nic mismatch on bootup and ask you for reassigning the nics at the shell. Just enter the new nic names for wan, lan, optx and you will be up and running with the old config on the new nics within minutes.
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Thank you :-)
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Those are ISA cards aren't they? Wow, trash those. ;D (though I'll admit… I still have a couple 3c509's sitting in my box of NICs as well for some reason) ISA isn't fast enough to handle most modern broadband connections, you'd probably be lucky to get 3-4 Mb though a box using ISA NICs.
They can be a real pain to get to work properly on FreeBSD as well, if you search the m0n0wall list archives there is info there.
It's not worth the trouble.
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No, they are pci cards. The PC I got to make into the new firewall needs low-profile cards though, and only has one pci slot so I won't be using them other than in test mode - I bought a low-profile dual port Intel card.
Cheers, Liam
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No, they are pci cards.
Must be 3C905 then, not 509. Just double checked and the 509 are indeed the ISA cards I have.
this specifically: http://www.weirdstuff.com/mas_assets/thumb/11029.jpgThe 3C905 cards, which are the most common 3Com PCI cards, work well with pfSense.
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Whoops, my bad :-( They are indeed 3c905s - I obviously spent too many years being burnt with 3c509s!
Cheers, Liam