As the title says, I got a pretty good deal on a network card with 4xRTL8125BG interface chips, with the hope of using it in a PFSense build. Now I’m not a complete dingdong, I know realtek and freeBSD don;t always work amazingly depending on the ae of the card and os, so I did some research before buying.
What I saw suggested that it would work, but that I may need to install the Kmod package and edit /boot/loader.conf I have done both of those, installing kmod 196.04(I think is the newest) and adding the recommended lines to loader.conf but the interfaces still are not detected. I also booted into a Linux live boot just the make sure and the Linux boot does detect the interfaces so it seems the card is working.
Has anyone gotten this type of Realtek chip working with PFSense? Or is it just not possible?
I guess you’re referring to the driver in the ports repo, there are newer versions available but I don’t know how pfsense handles packages from the ports repo.
In general I’d recommend relatively recent controller(s)/NICs by Intel, Broadcom and Chelsio.
Oh man, I was so close, thank you! For some reason, I was finding it really hard to find info on installing and using kmod on pfsense so I thought I had the newest version. Tried the pkg install command from this page and it updated the package to newest and magically my interfaces are working.
Yeah, I do know that in general those brands/manufacturers are better supported, especially intel, but the Realtek stuff is far more often on sale, or just generally cheaper. So for home/home lab use when on a very tight budget it’s nice when I can get it to work. This pfsense build is all recycled parts from a previous job and this one card so I have spent a total of 65$ cad for an ng firewall with now 7 ports, 2 of which are 2.5gig so that’s pretty good.