Re-purpose and old laptop as APFW, but not finding PCMCIA ethernet card

Xotic750

I have an old NEC Versa (circa 2005), it has 1Gb memory and a 60Gb HDD, built in WIFI (ath5k) and Realtek network card (8139). It is also equipped with a PCMCIA slot, in which I have a Digitus Gigabyte network adapter (Realtek 8110 chip I believe). Installation of pfsense (2.2.6) went smoothly, but it is not seeing the PCMCIA network card and configuration as AP firewall seems next to impossible without it. I have a Fedora 17 Live DVD that runs on the laptop and the PCMCIA network card is recognised. I performed an 'lspci -k' that shows the kernel drivers that are in use.

http://pastebin.com/kpFScmWT

So, I wanted to know if there is a way to get this PCMCIA ethernet adaptor working with pfsense, or if there is just no support for it?

If I can't get it working then are then any good tutorials for getting this laptop (1 Ethernet and 1 WIFI) working as an APFW?

Any help is appreciated.

NOYB

I don't know about the WiFi. Seems most people use an external AP for that. But for the LAN/WAN, connect it to a smart switch and configure a VLAN for the WAN.

Xotic750

Thanks for the response. I do/will have an external AP (Netgear WGR614v9) available, but I do not have a smart switch or any budget for buying things (unemployed due to a stroke). This is just a home project and I'm am looking to reuse things that are laying around (or can find in the local rubbish) and are no longer used. Some of my goals are to have DHCP serve different DNS addresses to different family members (kids) and be able to set rules to deny access to specific sites or deny internet at certain times of the day. I would use (or try) something like OpenWRT on my AP but it's not supported, and I can't get it to run properly on the laptop (yet, compiling the code from scratch without much knowledge to what I'm switching on or need), so this is why I am now looking at pfsense to see if it is viable. If I could just get the PCMCIA card working then I think I would be well under way.

NOYB

@Xotic750:

If I could just get the PCMCIA card working then I think I would be well under way.

Yup, think so. When I first started I was using a Xircom or Intel PCMCIA card in notebook for WAN. It's been a while since then so don't recall if I was running that natively (bare metal) or in a Win7 hosted VM.

A Virtualbox VM might be another way to get both LAN and WAN via the single onboard NIC without the need of VLAN and smart switch. If that notebook can run an OS that is supported by Oracle VirtualBox then it might be worth looking into. Bare metal would be better but working trumps bare metal that's not working.

VirtualBox
https://www.virtualbox.org/
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html

Xotic750

Thanks for the further suggestion. I guess what I need to figure out is whether there is a driver being loaded to handle the PCMCIA host controller or whether it is the actual PCMCIA adapter driver that is not loading or not available? Suggestions about how I should investigate the problem are more than welcome, I'm willing to put in some effort to track down the issue and hopefully be able to resolve it.

As a note, I was able to get the PCMCIA adapter working with OpenWRT by compiling in the support into the kernel, but I have been unable to get the WIFI working with that

NOYB

I'm not a driver person myself but I know there are some folk around here that are very drivers knowledgeable and hopefully someone will step in with some help.

By the way. Which version of pfSense are you using for this? Perhaps the FreeBSD drivers needed for that PCMCIA card are in a different version.

Xotic750

I'm using the latest stable 2.2.6 install from the download page. https://www.pfsense.org/download/

That's the only version that I have tried.

NOYB

So that runs on FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p25
The upcoming pfSense 2.3 runs on FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE.

Check those two versions of FreeBSD to see if they have drivers for the PCMCIA card and chip set.

Xotic750

10.1 Hardware https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/hardware.html

I see support for RealTek RTL8169, which appears to be the driver that fedora 17 and OpenWrt loads

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
    Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8169/8110 Family PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC
    Kernel driver in use: r8169

No mention of my exact PCMCIA card.

One would assume that the host controller is supported, but I don't see it mentioned. Though not sure which piece of hardware it is from my 'lspci' output (link in original post). But I guess it is

02:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b1)
    Subsystem: NEC Corporation Device 824c
    Kernel driver in use: yenta_cardbus

This is an 'lspci -k' from my OpenWRT build, and it can be seen to be somewhat similar to that from the original Fedora 17 list that I originally posted.

http://pastebin.com/Whd2aCNt

I will boot pfsense and try to capture the output from that.

Xotic750

There doesn't appear to be any 'lspci' on the live dvd of pfsense, is there some way that I can achieve something similar?

I did manage to find a command 'pciconf -lv' from the following post

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=24035.0

which gives some information but not the same

http://pastebin.com/7VZgeARz

And I have the dmesg.boot log file

http://pastebin.com/jNGZK3y5

And is this info relevant?


cbb0: <rf5c476 pci-cardbus="" bridge=""> at device 10.0 on pci2
cardbus0: <cardbus bus=""> on cbb0
pccard0: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb0</cardbus></rf5c476>

I also have the output from 'kldstat -v'
http://pastebin.com/m64Rw76L

NOYB

What does console option 1 show for available interfaces?

Xotic750

It shows 'ath0' (the on-board WIFI) and 'rl0' (the on-board ethernet)

NOYB

Well it looks to me like the re driver would be the most likely to support the Realtek 8110. But even that seems to indicate 811xS. You might see if you could get the re driver to load. Getting a bit outside of my league here though.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=re&sektion=4

Xotic750

Thanks, looking through the 'kldstat -v' I can see 'miibus' and 're' appear to be loaded. Scratching my head over what to check/try next.

NOYB

Any BIOS settings that may alter the PCMCIA?
Turn off WiFi adapter in BIOS.

Other than the chipset just not being supported by any of the FreeBSD drivers, that's all I have left.

Oh and also try pfSense 2.3.

Xotic750

Nothing for altering the PCMCIA in any way. There is an on/off option for the WIFI but it doesn't make any difference wrt the PCMCIA card working. As a side note, I have now managed to get all the hardware working with a custom OpenWRT build, and the laptop works as an APFW. I would still like to get pfsense working and perform some comparisons, and have a choice. I'm just out of ideas of what can be done to diagnose and the fix the problem, if it is at all possible. Thanks for all your suggestions so far and hopefully someone with the needed experience can provide some input. Going to play with it using OpenWRT for now (connected to the internet with it while writing this). ;)

NOYB

@Xotic750:

Thanks, looking through the 'kldstat -v' I can see 'miibus' and 're' appear to be loaded. Scratching my head over what to check/try next.

Does ifconfig show the re interface? Admittedly a moonshot but would be interesting if it does and pfSense doesn't see it.

Xotic750

No, 'ifconfig -a' does not show the missing interface. :(