Intel NIC issues

[Michael L. Squires]

> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se>wrote:
>
> Using kenv smbios.system.product   might be a good indication of what you
> have too.
>

Running "kenv smbios.system.product" on two of my machines with Supermicro
motherboards gives me "P4SSE" and "P4DC6" which are both correct.

I know Supermicro has made variants of boards for vendors; for example, I
have a P4DC6 which has no RAID card slot (the solder pads are there, not
the card connector) although this is alleged to be a standard feature of
the P4DC6 in the Supermicro manual.

I have a 1U server (the P4SSE) with a "bge" gigabit Ethernet NIC; rather
than fight with the cards issues I installed an Intel PCI-X gigabit card,
cost $15.  Now that the "bge" problems appear to be solved I may go back
to it, however.  (The Intel NIC uses an internal riser which allows for
one card).  If your vendor promised you two gigabit NICs this may be the
cheap solution (other than replacing the motherboard).

I'm using Intel Pro/1000 and Pro/100 cards exclusively, except in a 
notebook, and I've never found FreeBSD to incorrectly identify the 
card.

Mike Squires