Greetings I got this board "GIGABYTE GA-Z97N-WIFI" Well because it Mini-itx and has 2x LAN ports and a Wifi AC card, I thought it would be the perfect small router. anyway after installing pfsense only the intel NIC was detected by pfsense. So I searched a lot and Only found this one guide https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=88511.0 and a followed it but I was unsuccessful. although I'm sure that both motherboards have the same 2nd NIC "Atheros 8161B" but I don't understand why its not working. and also found these threads Thread 1 Thread 2 also created this thread with no reply My thread
I don't have any idea how to rebuild(compile) the kernel and I'm kinda of a noob to freebsd.
I thought about installing EXSI VMware and then pfsense on top of that to get it to work but going to leave that as my last option. any ideas on how to get this to work?
Are you familiar with virtual box? get some practice in a VM. No time like the present. Install a VM of pfsense and then see what happens when you update the kernel:
from what i understand that this is a beta driver, it kinda works I can see my NIC now But I can't use it, So it won't get DHCP or even send/receive any packets in static IP mode. it gets the MAC address of the NIC though... I know weird.
ok so I understood that if_alc.ko that I took from (freebsd 11 current ISO) has the latest drivers and they work.(according to the pfsense forums) But every time I load it I get on Putty this error:
kldload: an error occurred while loading the module. Please check dmesg(8) for more details.
and on the main console I get this error:
KLD if_alc.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch linker_load_file: Unsupported file type
So I searched some more and I found out you have to rebuild the kernel and I have no idea how to do that, So I though I ask you @wendell
Not even EXSI can detect this NIC, I read a post about Hyper-V working perfectly. But I'm not buying a windows license for this. I Think I will just buy an Intel NIC and forget this. Meh.
It looks like you'd have to setup freebsd wih the same kernel version as pfsense and get it working there from the freebsd howto then copy the driver from that to pfsense? I haven't done this and would need to experiment