Intel 225v nic issues and pfSense complications.
Intel 225v nic issues and pfSense complications.
I first shared this on Reddit in the /r/homelab and /r/pfsense threads without getting any replies. Now I’m reaching out again! I’ve been attempting to get my offbranded Intel i225v (B3) NIC to function under pfSense 22.01. There was nothing I could do to make the setup detect the card. Eventually, it worked, but I’m curious if anyone else has faced similar issues. My server is a ThinkServer RS210, X3430, with 4GB RAM, dual onboard 1GbE, and pfSense 22.01. I tried connecting it as expected, but nothing happened—BIOS didn’t see the card, and the OS couldn’t either. However, the power and link light were present. I suspected the riser card might be the issue. So I removed the riser and connected the card directly into the 8xG2 slot. The link light came back on, but BIOS and OS still didn’t recognize it. I disabled the onboard NICs and left only the i225v installed. Both BIOS/OS failed to detect it, but the link light worked. During all this, dmesg logs showed nothing about the card. Neither did pciconf -lv or dmidecode. At this point, I’m considering the card might be defective. I took it out and tried it on an old HP desktop with Ubuntu 21.04. It booted up, recognized the card, assigned an IP, and I ran a speed test—about 980MBps. That’s impressive! The card isn’t dead. (lspci reported it running at 1x degraded; my notes suggest that could explain the lower speeds.) When I reinserted it into the RS210, grabbed my i350-t4 Intel card, and installed both on the dual riser card, disabling the onboard NICs, it worked perfectly. PFSense now recognized all five ports. The i350 was labeled “igb” and the i225v “igc.” I set up WAN/LAN, ran a speed test, and achieved roughly 1300MBps. Now I’m wondering: is this unusual? It doesn’t seem logical to need an i350-T4 just to get the i225v online. Could it be that the card was inserted on both sides of the riser? Also, is Gen2 PCIe fast enough for 2.5Gbps? I have a 1.5Gb port and struggle with speeds above 1Gbps through it. I’m connected to the 2.5 port, and pfSense sees the NIC configured for 2500GBASE. It’s using an 8x Gen2 slot via a 90-degree riser card. I’m still puzzled about why these problems occurred. Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
I don’t see any reason for the i225 card not appearing before unless there was a conflict with the BIOS settings. PCIe Gen2 x1 delivers 4Gbps. It seems you likely have one 2.5GbE port linked to the Shaw modem. What devices are connected to the LAN ports of PFSense? If you’re using a single 1Gb connection to a switch, that’s probably the limiting factor. With an aggregated link to a switch, individual clients won’t exceed 1Gb. Multiple clients on the i350-T4 ports will each be capped but together should reach full speed.
My bad, I seemed to be unclear. This is my gateway machine.. Its hooked directly to my cable modem on the 2.5gb port (5ft, cat6) . There is no switch on this (WAN) side of the firewall... my LAN is attached to a gbe switch via one of the ports on my i350-T4, but all my problems/testing are with the gateway machine itself. I am not doing anything fancy like teaming, or lacp. My modem is also in bridge mode to avoid additional overhead and double nat.
I am aware that my internal lan is 1gbps, but i am doing my speedtesting from my pfsense firewall (directly connected to the modem).. There is a ookla speedtest client for freebsd you can download and run. ( https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli ) I was testing from the firewall and from the lan at the same time to try and max out the connection to see if i was limited in some other way.. I figured out my speed problem, the modem had the incorrect config file... problem remains why the card acted so weird in the first place.