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.
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.
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.
On a router, I’d rather spend $40 on a NIC that doesn’t pile up every kernel update. In the early days of Linux, I’d always keep a NE2000 in servers as a backdoor network connection for any system that had a compiled driver for a faster card.
Yeah it’s a pain in the arse. I 100% recommend Broadcom or Intel NICs for a router. I have a fileserver which has several Intel NICs and a single Realtek one and the latter is a PITA.
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…
Anecdotal, but I was guiding a friend through setting OS up and it just wouldn’t happen with an RTL8169. Swapped in an Intel, away it went. So that’s a sample set of 1, take it for what it’s worth. But realtek have been a pain in my ass for decades, it really didn’t surprise me.