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My FreeBSD 5.2 fileserver has been running quite happily however has been using only a 10Mbit network card. I finally found the time to grab a 100Mbit card and install it. However, after installing it FreeBSD seems to hang at random points. Sometimes during boot, other times it will last long enough for me to install/configure the new card. I did this by typing 'sysinstall' and then going to configure and networking. The card was listed at the top and if I were to select no to IpV6 and yes to DHCP, BSD would being to search for a DHCP server but eventually hang. I bought two identical network cards and both have had the same issue on this machine. They've both got Realtek chipsets and thus detect in BSD as rl0.
As we speak I'm installing Win2k on a spare box and will test the cards in that just to see if it's maybe the cards.
In the meantime can anyone suggest anything else?
When I say 'hang' I mean a cold freeze - i.e. NOTHING works except the big blue button
Distribution: OpenBSD 4.6, OS X 10.6.2, CentOS 4 & 5
Posts: 3,660
Rep:
Ugh, Realtek You should search Google for reports of problems before buying any hardware, because Realtek cards have a very bad reputation for being unreliable and causing a lot of strain on CPUs. I'd be willing to bet that you would have zero problems with an Intel card.
In the mean time, try moving the card to another slot in the motherboard, it might be a bad PCI slot. Also, make sure the card is completely seated, some times a card has an ill-fitting back plate on it that does not allow it to seat properly in certain cases or mother boards (or the case or motherboard might be badly designed and cause the same problem). I doubt that ACPI would cause problems in this case, but I do know that a lot of odd issues with FreeBSD have been solved by disabling ACPI. There's a guide in the FreeBSD handbook (at www.FreeBSD.org) on how to disable it.
I have had Realtek cards running without any problems on a few systems without noticing any problems. The old 10Mbit card was a realtek chipset. But if you're used to problems then that's something I wasn't aware of. As far as the PCI slot is concerned I have plugged both the network cards into the same slot as the original card yet both still lock up. How do you feel about D-link cards? Are they any better/worse? Thanks for your suggestions. When I can get back to my server I'll try what you've said.
Distribution: OpenBSD 4.6, OS X 10.6.2, CentOS 4 & 5
Posts: 3,660
Rep:
I'd still try swapping the cards around to different PCI slots to see if it makes a difference. The interrupt routing can be weird some times. Definitely try disabling ACPI, because like I said it clears up a lot of just plain odd problems in FreeBSD with certain hardware.
As for other cards, D-link are risky because they use several different chipsets and you never know what you're going to get. As for other cheap NICs, avoid Belkin at all cost, they use poor quality National Semiconductor chipsets. Netgear is hit & miss as well, come to think of it I think they use NatSemi chipsets. Linksys tends to be the least bad of the budget rate cards. I would still highly recommend Intel cards, though. You can get them for less than $20 online (plus a few bucks for shipping), or around $35 if you can actually find them in a retail store. Both the performance and the reliability of Intel cards is remarkable.
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