Hello all
First some background:
I have setup a small router box with OPNsense on it however I ran into some connection issues on the LAN side after initial setup preventing me from accessing the web GUI.
After tinkering a bit I noticed that if I unplug the WAN port I can access the web GUI. If I replug it again I can still access it. If I then unplug/replug the LAN port it does not work anymore. Rebooting after unplug/replug of WAN it will fail again.
For the card I had assigned port 1 to WAN and port 2 to LAN and noticed during bootup that the status up messages comes first for the first port then the second. I tried switching them around and now on reboot it will work however if I ever unplug/replug the LAN port I will have to unplug/replug the WAN port after.
At first I thought it was a bug in OPNsense (v23.1) so I tried installing pfSense (v2.7) and same issue. I had also read that there could be some issues between intel cards and amd system so I tried an older intel machine I have lying around and still the same issue as well.
During all this I had this inkling suspicion that my intel card could perhaps be a counterfeit and that could be the issue. I originally bought the card over a year ago to use for PCIe passthrough but I never got the project started. Back then I read about counterfeit so I bought it new from a retail store expecting they would not be selling counterfeits.
Now looking over different post on the web I discovered that the one I have looks almost the same as the counterfeit ones. Although old the following forum post shows differences between genuine and fake:
I can’t post links: h t t p s : // forums.servethehome .com/index.php?threads/comparison-intel-i350-t4-genuine-vs-fake.6917/
I took some images of my own (bottom of post) as you can see apart from some numbers it looks like the fake with smaller heatsink and no engraved “delta” word etc.
Questions:
- First of all I believe the card is fake and would like to try reimbursement however I do not know how I could prove to seller it is. Pointing at pictures might not be convincing. Anybody has any ideas?
- Secondly I was wondering if anybody has an idea about the connection issue assuming it is not related to the card being fake. Could it happen for a genuine one as well if that was the case? Considering that I have tried both OPNsense and pfSense and on 2 separate machines it points to the card being the culprit?
Thanks
