Dell R210 ii + SFP Card + Pfsense/opnsense/freebsd

[Billionairebum]

Hello

Does anyone have specific experience with the Dell R210 ii / SFP cards / Sense varient?

I have been struggling to get this combo working and I am not sure where to go. With on card the R210 won't boot, with another card it doesn't play well with FreeBSD and I am beginning to grow tired to trying different cards. If anyone has some experience around this semi overkill firewall setup, please let me know.

Chelsio 520 10g
Myricom dual 10g

 

[Switch]

With on card the R210 won't boot

Won't boot at all like to bios and post, or boot into freebsd?

trying different cards

Refer to the freebsd website, there is a section listing fairly exhaustively all the supported hardware and chipsets.

 

[Billionairebum]

Won't boot at all like to bios and post, or boot into freebsd?



Refer to the freebsd website, there is a section listing fairly exhaustively all the supported hardware and chipsets.

With the Chelsio, I beliueve the issue is related to the Dell and the card compatability.
With the Myri, I am not sure why it is not working, It refuses to load anything and then when you force the correct tunables and driver as per freebsd and sense it shows up but it will not activate at all, with anything plugged in or not, different SFPs etc. It is a very strange one.

 

[Switch]

With the Chelsio, I beliueve the issue is related to the Dell and the card compatability.
With the Myri, I am not sure why it is not working, It refuses to load anything and then when you force the correct tunables and driver as per freebsd and sense it shows up but it will not activate at all, with anything plugged in or not, different SFPs etc. It is a very strange one.

Refer to the freebsd website, there is a section listing fairly exhaustively all the supported hardware and chipsets.

Check against the kernel version.

FreeBSD 14.0 Hardware Notes

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.

www.freebsd.org

You should not need to be forcing anything if it is supported.

 

[Billionairebum]

"
The mxge driver supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Myricom LANai Z8E chips:

• Myricom 10GBase-CX4 (10G-PCIE-8A-C, 10G-PCIE-8AL-C)
• Myricom 10GBase-R (10G-PCIE-8A-R, 10G-PCIE-8AL-R)
• Myricom 10G XAUI over ribbon fiber (10G-PCIE-8A-Q, 10G-PCIE-8AL-Q)"

"
The cxgbe driver supports 40Gb, 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet adapters based on the T5 ASIC:

• Chelsio T580-CR
• Chelsio T580-LP-CR
• Chelsio T580-LP-SO-CR
• Chelsio T560-CR
• Chelsio T540-CR
• Chelsio T540-LP-CR
• Chelsio T522-CR
• Chelsio T520-LL-CR
• Chelsio T520-CR
• Chelsio T520-SO
• Chelsio T520-BT
• Chelsio T504-BT"

The chelsio is supported and should work, but there seems to be a hardware compatibility issue with the Dell.
I Used the mxge driver (loaded via tunables as per docs) with the Myricom, but it refused to activate.

 

[Billionairebum]

It seems to be an incompatability between Dell Rx10 and Rx20 with the Chelsio > Dell PowerEdge R320 - Dell Chelsio T520-CR | DELL Technologies

For the Myricom, I guess I could try different drivers.

 

[Billionairebum]

Ok so due to a number of factors, this setup will just not work for my needs. I'll sell it for R1500 and look at an R220 or R230.

Thanks for the help anyways.

 

[Switch]

It seems to be an incompatability between Dell Rx10 and Rx20 with the Chelsio > Dell PowerEdge R320 - Dell Chelsio T520-CR | DELL Technologies

For the Myricom, I guess I could try different drivers.

During boot, or if you are able to login to pfsense, you can read the dmesg and check what happens during the boot process when it tries to load the divers for the nic, you will see lines regarding the name of the nic (chipset) and then the appropriate driver like mxge. For seemingly incompatible issues, you can try the smbus hack as referred to a few posts down here (warning, this is like a hail mary in your case so proceed with caution),

Anyone have Intel i350 NIC working in Z230?

I'm trying to install an Intel i350 4-port NIC in my Z230 SFF. After I insert the card in either Slot 1 Slot 4* (PCH PCIe 2.0 x4 in x16) or Slot 4 Slot 1* (CPU PCIe 3.0 x16) and power on, the Z230 SFF beeps 5 times and will not complete POST or display any video. If you have an i350-based NIC...

h30434.www3.hp.com

Side note, depending on the specs and if your server has rails I may be interested in taking it off your hands.

 

[Billionairebum]

During boot, or if you are able to login to pfsense, you can read the dmesg and check what happens during the boot process when it tries to load the divers for the nic, you will see lines regarding the name of the nic (chipset) and then the appropriate driver like mxge. For seemingly incompatible issues, you can try the smbus hack as referred to a few posts down here (warning, this is like a hail mary in your case so proceed with caution),

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Busin...-Intel-i350-NIC-working-in- Z230/td-p/6109003

Side note, depending on the specs and if your server has rails I may be interested in taking it off your hands.

I posted in r/homelab and another user hit the same issues without a decent solution, all went away shifting to a R230. I've looked up and down at this and it's simply not compatible for the way I want it to run. I have rails, I'll need to see if it's for the R210 or a different server.