FreeBSD is an amazing OS, or I learned a lot last night, Part 2

One thing I have learned for sure is something I always thought was true. FreeBSD is an amazing operating system. It is clean, lean and powerful. We just turned an old Dell Precision 410 into a network router/firewall with 4 NICs and many many vlans. That part was easy except for the cheap NICs I have been using.

The onboard NIC had to be disabled because it was conflicting with the PCI ones. I had purchased 2 identical Linksys cards at Fry's only to get back to the server room to find they are completely different cards. One was a v2 and the other was a v5.1. The v5.1 works great, but the v2 was timing out under any network load.

So out it came and in went another NIC I had rescued from an old machine. Bingo! except that the driver wasn't compiled into the kernel. FreeBSD to the rescue. I just kldload'd the driver up and then added it to loader.conf like so:

if_sis_load="YES"

and we are back on the road again. After a little testing all is well and the cards are all playing happily along. One thing I would change about this would be to get a good brand name server grade multi-port NIC. The box has one already and it works flawlessly. Next time I won't even start this without one.

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