SOLVED Network Drivers for Dell T30

[JerryT]

I have installed FreeNAS V11.0U4 on 2 USB memory sticks, on a Dell T30 that I got for a great price on Cyber Monday, but FreeNAS v11 does not see the NIC on the motherboard. The Dell support site does not have any NIC drivers or indicate what kind of NIC it is under the SPECS tab. Just for the heck of it I installed Centos 7 on the one internal hard drive and it sees the NIC.
It came with a Xeon E3
8GB ram
1tb hard drive
Any help would be nice, along with HOW to install the driver.

Jerry

 

[nightshade00013]

Well you will have a pain trying to load a driver anyway. However from what I can gather the nic is the i217LM and if that is the case then you may just want to buy an intel NIC card and forget using the built in.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/i217lm-intel-i210at-different-drivers.26631/

https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-poweredge-t30-mt-xeon-e3-1225v5-3-3-ghz-8-gb-1-tb/specs/

Also the FreeBSD hardware support list for 11.0 doesn't show it as being supported https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#ethernet And looked at the 11.1 and it is not listed their either.

 

[JerryT]

Thanks a bunch. I have an Intel NIC coming in a couple of days. At least not all is lost. I did not think of checking CNET for hardware information. So that's some info for the ole memory bank.

 

[wblock]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/i217lm-intel-i210at-different-drivers.26631/

As far as I see, that's a two-year-old thread which says the i217LM works anyway. It seems to work here, all my net access goes through one.

@JerryT, we need details. What is the output of ifconfig from FreeNAS? And pciconf -lv? Does the T30 only have one Ethernet interface? If it has more than one, have you disconnected all but the i217LM?

 

[JerryT]

Wblock,
Thank you for your response. First let me say that I bought the T30 for the purpose of using it on my D-Star repeater for a software upgrade and since I did not have a 2nd NIC to put in right away I thought I'd try to install FreeNAS V11 on it and if it worked I would get another (Dell had a Green Monday special for $299).
But in my haste after the Console Setup came up, I pushed #1 Configure Network Interface, not even looking at the bottom where it told me what the IP address was for the WEB interface. When it finished configuring em0, and came back to the console setup screen, the web interface IP address was gone. I did this because I did not see any semblance of an IP address that would have come from my router. I did see 127.0.0.1 go by, so I missed that actual IP address that was assigned to the system. I thought that it was not seeing the motherboard Ethernet connection. Had I done another re-boot I probably would not have even had to ask for help from the forum.
I then installed Centos7 for the D-Star project and the Ethernet connection was found. So my assumption was that FreeNAS did not have the drivers for the NIC as part of the install.
I can send you the results of what ifconfig and pciconf -lv shows, but I would have to type it in from a picture I took with my phone.
I guess in a panic to get it working before the sale ended (and it did), it turned out to be cockpit error. I must say I have been using FreeNAS since V8 and have had no issues. It's nice to see that you have included the user guide available from the GUI.
Thanks
Jerry

 

[wblock]

I think this means that this thread is solved. It should be possible to delete or reset the network configuration from the console menu. Or just reinstall FreeNAS. If you can, please try that and post back to verify that the i217LM in the Dell T30 works. Thanks!

 

[JerryT]

I installed version 11, and then updated to v11.1. The only issue was that after the reboot after the update, the server just turned off. I powered it back up it went through the update, then without warning the screen went black and the server shutdown. There was no indication of pending shutdown on the screen. I powered it back up and v11.1 was up and running. So yes being that I was able to down load the .1 update tells me that the i217LM on the Dell T30 works. Thanks for all of your help, sorry about the late reply but ended up working a 12 shift on Thursday, had a sleep study done on Friday night, went Christmas shopping on Saturday and wrapped gifts on Sunday. Going back to work to rest. :):)