So my freind upgraded his network to 2.5gb and has been having trouble with pfsense and opnsense. found out it could be his realtek nic in his dell optiplex router. any cheap 4 port 2.5gb nic’s he can try? He can use 2 - 2 port NICs if he must.
Look for something built on an Intel i225 or i226, there should be a 4 port model
Realtek NICs are known to be kinda incompatible with PFSense (some features won’t work). But supposedly they work just fine with OPNSense. Maybe the NIC is just faulty? I haven’t personally used OPNSense, so I can’t really say for sure.
But if your friend wants to run PFSense, he needs an Intel NIC, period. I’d argue that most people probably don’t need 4 ports, they just need to add a decent 2.5G switch if they want more ports. But your friend might know better if he has a specific use case that requires a 4 port NIC.
Realtek NICs just never seem to work well with any Unix-like variants. I’ve never had good luck with them in Linux, which has far better/wider hardware support than FreeBSD does.
He wants to try to use opnsense due to the problems with netgate.
Fair. I’ve been considering OPNSense myself, but I bought an Intel NIC just so that I know I have the option of using either. Also, the nerds here generally agree that they’re higher quality than Realtek.
Search “i225 4 port nic” on ebay.
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