Good FreeBSD Supported Gigabit Ethernet Card?

Steve Bertrand iaccounts at ibctech.ca
Thu Sep 13 23:17:52 PDT 2007


Oliver Hansen wrote:
> I'm looking to eventually upgrade my home network to all gigabit so I'm
> going to start by purchasing a few NICs for some old servers I just
> received. I know there are quite a few supported by FreeBSD6 which I
> found ( http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html#ETHERNET
> ) but I'm wondering if there is any real benefit in buying a $40 or $50
> NIC like the Netgear GA311 or just get a $20 NIC like the D-Link
> DFE-530TX+. The use will probably be a firewall, proxy, file server, and
> DVR.
> <http://www.EagleBit.com/Netgear_GA311_Gigabit_PCI_Card_p/eb-400-00357.htm>

I have a few Netgear GA311's in production, and although I haven't done
any benchmarking, I know that they work rock solid operating atop the re
driver in my backup infrastructure:

backup# uname -a
FreeBSD backup 6.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Mon Mar  5
16:57:55 EST 2007

backup# ifconfig
re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=1b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>

.... I can't speak of D-Link however. Aside from the NIC's, I have found
some performance issues with NetGear GigE managed switches though,
whereas they seem to slowly loose throughput width after a few months
without a reboot.

Steve


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