Can PCI Intel 82571EB NIC work w/FreeNAS

[FilmBuff5]

Greetings, all.

I recently build a FreeNAS box (WD Red Pro 6tb drives, 32gb RAM) and would like to know if the Intel 8257EB PCI NIC can work with it?

I installed the card and nothing new was detected upon bootup, so I'm at a standstill up to now.

Any help would be vastly appreciated...hoping someone can confirm if this NIC is supported and how to proceed. Thanks.

 

[wblock]

There's a digit missing from that model number. 82571EB, maybe? The em0 driver supports that.

What other cards do you have in that system, and what is the output of ifconfig?

 

[FilmBuff5]

Hi, wblock...thanks for the reply.

Yep, it's the 82571EB that I have...output of ifconfig is attached...can you see it?

No other cards in the system. All I've done since installing FreeNAS was to make the sure all the drives showed OK and defined the volume.

I notice on the ifconfig that I'm running at half-duplex BTW...how to I set this to full-duplex? And is there a way to run commands in the shell and output to a file...guess that would make for easier reading and uploading here, etc.

Sorry about that...<sheepish grin>.

 

[FilmBuff5]

Right now, the mobo has a single Intel I217LM which was detected on the inital install.

 

[wblock]

Please post the output of pciconf -lv | grep -B4 ethernet. Text inside [code][/nocode] tags is preferred to screen captures. Please also identify the version of FreeNAS being used.

Half-duplex often means a duplex mismatch due to a low-quality Ethernet switch.

 

[FilmBuff5]

FreeNAS-11.0-U2 (e417d8aa5)

Code:

[root@freenas ~]#  pciconf -lv | grep -B4 ethernet							
em0@pci0:0:25:0:		class=0x020000 card=0x85351043 chip=0x153a8086 rev=0x05
hdr=0x00																		
	vendor	 = 'Intel Corporation'											
	device	 = 'Ethernet Connection I217-LM'								
	class	  = network														
	subclass   = ethernet													 

>Half-duplex often means a duplex mismatch due to a low-quality Ethernet switch.

Interesting...it's a simple Netgear 4 port switch I have about while the NAS is on the workbench. Didn't give me problems up to now, but ok.


Thanks.

 

[wblock]

The second Ethernet card is not even in the list of detected PCI devices, which probably means the new card is not functional. Or maybe that slot is not working. Can you test the card in a different system?

 

[FilmBuff5]

The second Ethernet card is not even in the list of detected PCI devices, which probably means the new card is not functional. Or maybe that slot is not working. Can you test the card in a different system?

Unfortunately, no...all my machines are laptops and unable to confirm if this PCI card is good or not.

It was purchased about a year ago, new...not saying new stuff can't arrive in non-working condition, but generally it doesn't happen.

So you assert that if the card were good, it would have been detected on power-up then? And that the correct driver would have loaded by the system? If FreeNAS were unable to find the right driver, would it would still show up on the pciconf list?

Just trying to understand more about how FreeNAS detects devices, etc.

 

[wblock]

pciconf(8) shows the list of devices the PCI bus says are attached. If a FreeBSD device driver connects to the device, it is shown in the first field, like the em0@pci0:0:25:0: shown in the output. If the card is detected but there are no drivers attached to it, that becomes none@. You could look for the device in the unfiltered output (just pciconf -lv | less -RS). I'm not sure what could be done if that card is detected but is not seen as an Ethernet card.

It's worth looking through the BIOS for ridiculous gamer-type options that might disable the PCI slot. Overclocking, super-"optimized" settings, some of that kind of thing might prevent a normal card from working.

 

[FilmBuff5]

Thanks for helping me understand a little more how devices are detected and such (w/FreeNAS). FreeNAS is a new animal to me...as I went from MS-DOS to Windows and little else (aside from a early foray with Mandrake Linux back in its day).

I'll look at the BIOS settings to see if there's anything set there that might be affecting this situation. But AFAIK, I'm running everything at default and nothing special/optimized is set.

So for FreeNAS though, if hardware is added after the initial install...the system will do its best to match it against what hardware drivers are bundled with v11. Is that right?

 

[wblock]

So for FreeNAS though, if hardware is added after the initial install...the system will do its best to match it against what hardware drivers are bundled with v11. Is that right?

Yes.

 

[BigDave]

You are dealing with a legacy port and therefore have to determine
the generation of the onboard PCI port, vs. the generation of the card.
Are you dealing with:

• 32-bit at 33 MHz
• 32-bit at 66 MHz
• 64-bit at 33 MHz
• 64-bit at 66 MHz

It may help to look at the output of dmidecode -t9
and checking the factory specs of NIC card.

 

[Ericloewe]

• 64-bit at 33 MHz

• 64-bit at 66 MHz

I'm sure those are not the case, since they're PCI-X. PCI-X has long been retired in the few situations where it used to be used, whereas normal PCI soldiered on long enough to occasionally still be encountered.

 

[FilmBuff5]

You are dealing with a legacy port and therefore have to determine
the generation of the onboard PCI port, vs. the generation of the card.
Are you dealing with:

• 32-bit at 33 MHz
• 32-bit at 66 MHz
• 64-bit at 33 MHz
• 64-bit at 66 MHz

It may help to look at the output of dmidecode -t9
and checking the factory specs of NIC card.

Here's the output of that command:

Code:

		Type: 32-bit PCI														
		Current Usage: Available												
		Length: Short														  
		ID: 3																  
		Characteristics:														
				3.3 V is provided											  
				Opening is shared											  
				PME signal is supported										
		Bus Address: 0000:ff:1c.7											  
																				
Handle 0x0022, DMI type 9, 17 bytes											
System Slot Information														
		Designation: PCI2													  
		Type: 32-bit PCI														
		Current Usage: Available												
		Length: Short														  
		ID: 4																  
		Characteristics:														
				3.3 V is provided											  
				Opening is shared											  
				PME signal is supported										
		Bus Address: 0000:ff:1d.0

 

[BigDave]

Here's the output of that command:

So is your card compatible with the slot you have?

 

[FilmBuff5]

It's a pci-e card...yes.

 

[wblock]

The output shown is only the last screenful of that command. Please redirect it to a file: dmidecode -t9 > /tmp/slots.txt. Then use scp to copy that file to another machine for posting.

However, it's unlikely that the card has been jammed into the wrong type of slot PCI rather than PCIe.

 

[FilmBuff5]

OK...some goods new to report back.

I was able to procure an used I350-T4 (at a decent price) and it was detected upon boot-up and loaded the necessary driver...hooray and what a relief!

So either the 82571 nic I have is a dud or ????

Only fly-in-the-ointment facing me now is why when I power up the system, it refuses to defer to the USB devices.

Instead, it tries to load the config off the hard drive(s) which of course won't work.

Am I overlooking something here? I have the Asus Q87M-E/CSM motherboard if anyone knows of it.

 

[FilmBuff5]

Got it all sorted out...reinstalled from scratch!