USB Ethernet Dongle Install

[thatsmychin]

I wanted to get my FreeNAS on an old ITX 1.2GHz Celeron board for the sake of noise and power consumption. It only has 10/100 on the board, and I'm using the only PCI slot for a storage controller. I picked up a StarTech USB to Gigabit Ethernet dongle and it will not work out of the box.

The supplied disk does have Linux drivers in a tar.gz, however my noob research and fumbling haven't produced any results. I'm familiar with basic commands (but have been corrupted by the GUI), but this is a bit out of my league.

I'll sadly admit that I can't even find a way to access my dvd drive to get to the file from the shell....feeling very lame. A nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

a. Obtain the kernel source tree for the platform in use and build it.
b. run 'make' command to smsc7500.ko module
c. load the module:
insmod smsc7500.ko
d. Plug in the lan7500 device into the USB port.
e. Configure the ethernet interface eth<n> in the usual way for an ethernet device.

 

[dlavigne]

The Linux driver won't work on FreeBSD. What is the output of this command from the FreeNAS shell: ifconfig

 

[thatsmychin]

What is the output of this command from the FreeNAS shell: ifconfig

I only get sis0 and lo0. SIS is on the onboard NIC. Guess I should have researched which ethernet dongle worked with FreeNAS before pulling the trigger on the cheapest one. Is there any hope for me?

 

[cyberjock]

I'd say there's a 5% chance you'll find one. Usually USB NICs are made by the lowest bidder. That usually means support for 1 OS... Windows.

 

[thatsmychin]

Usually USB NICs are made by the lowest bidder. That usually means support for 1 OS... Windows.

The dongle does have Mac and Linux drivers as well, so that's something. I had assumed that "making" meant that I had source code that would enable me to build it on any linux distro. I always thought BSD was Linux....guess not. Bummer.

 

[TheSmoker]

You will need to build a custom freebsd kernel with usb network support before saying it's really not supported.


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[Ryback]

You're not going to reach gigabit speeds with a USB 2.0. You might get 250-300 megabits per second. Personally I wouldn't bothered and just gone with the onboard NIC.