2.Ggb nic for opnsense
2.Ggb nic for opnsense
So my freind upgraded his network to 2.5gb and has been having trouble with pfsense and opnsense. found out it could be his realtek nic in his dell optiplex router. any cheap 4 port 2.5gb nic's he can try? He can use 2 - 2 port NICs if he must.
Look for something built on an Intel i225 or i226, there should be a 4 port model
Realtek NICs are known to be kinda incompatible with PFSense (some features won't work). But supposedly they work just fine with OPNSense. Maybe the NIC is just faulty? I haven't personally used OPNSense, so I can't really say for sure.
But if your friend wants to run PFSense, he needs an Intel NIC, period. I'd argue that most people probably don't need 4 ports, they just need to add a decent 2.5G switch if they want more ports. But your friend might know better if he has a specific use case that requires a 4 port NIC.
Realtek NICs just never seem to work well with any Unix-like variants. I've never had good luck with them in Linux, which has far better/wider hardware support than FreeBSD does.
He wants to try to use opnsense due to the problems with netgate.
Fair. I've been considering OPNSense myself, but I bought an Intel NIC just so that I know I have the option of using either. Also, the nerds here generally agree that they're higher quality than Realtek.
Realtek are a problem with FreeBSD in general, so Opnsense has issues with them as well.
If you're using any FreeBSD-based OS you should manually compile the realtek-re-kmod port. Make sure your kernel source is in sync with what you're running.
Got any examples of what the problems are? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue.
I did quite a bit of research before buying one of those generic Chinese N95 router boxes recently, and I ultimately settled on an Intel NIC just to have options (I want to try both OPNSense and PFSense). But all the reviews I found said that the options with Realtek NICs had problems with PFSense (bandwidth and VLANs not working) but functioned perfectly fine with OPNSense.
Maybe there are some poor quality Realtek NICs that should be avoided, but others are fine? Might be helpful to document that so the community is aware....
Search "i225 4 port nic" on ebay.
Thanks for the suggestion. I found a 2 port nic that should work, but I will keep looking for a 4 port