Need to know what 2.5GBE NIC Cards to aquire for FreeBSD 14 in my lab

L

lostinthesupermarket

1) Seems the Intel I-225V chipset is not reliable. Maybe new silicon has been made but I do not know.

2) The Realtek 8025BG drivers are not official. But there are millions of systems with this chipset and I have not heard of issues with Linux.

So what is a reliable option regardless of cost. Do not and will not go with 10Gbit Nics as they are rumored to be incompatible with Soho ISP Gateway hardware that support PON as opposed to AON. (the fast expanding Passive vs. the Active which is falling out of favor with with the new neighbourhood build outs of FTTH).

Another reason not to go 10GBE is due to existing cat 5e cables in the walls. Way too much noise to have any chance of 10G working.
Cat 6 on the other hand will carry 2.5G without issue.

My new gateway ONT being proivisioned next week in my lab is an Adtran XGS-PON 622v. It supports 10GbitE but the way my ISP is rolling out the passive splitters, the real top speed will never exceed 2.5GBE. (Thus no need for a massive upgrade of my internal fabric to 10GBE.

There must be an obvious solution because 2.5GBE is the next cost effective step up for LAN and WAN.
 
Uhhh... are you looking for network cards, cables, or managed edge devices? With FreeBSD, I'd prioritize hardware compatibility first, then the throughput capacity, and finally, bottlenecks.

NICs are pretty cheap (like $10-30 USD), and FreeBSD doesn't care what's installed, it should be able to see any ethernet outlet on the system, and send data down it. If you want data to flow faster, just buy higher-spec NIC and cables. If you don't want to upgrade cables, then it doesn't make sense to blow money on a higher-spec NIC...

Your gateway hardware may have the specs to pump a lot of data into your lab, but it's not gonna complain about Cat5e vs 6e cables. You'll get a bottleneck at worst.

And that's why Phishfry is saying that OP should hold on to their dough.
 
msplsh said:
I don't see any in the code, the 10G cards just have settings to be tuned down.
Click to expand...
surprise: 2.5Gbit *is* nothing else than crippled, overpriced 10Gbit chipsets.

lostinthesupermarket said:
There must be an obvious solution because 2.5GBE is the next cost effective step up for LAN and WAN.
Click to expand...
It isn't - it has been a dead and outdated at the moment it was announced.
10Gbit is an old hat and widely and *very* cheaply available. 2.5Gbit isn't and apart from a small niche that will very likely also move on within very short time, nobody takes it seriously (hence the overall lack of proper hardware, switches etc...).

If your 'homelab' really spans multiple rooms I'd just use those ancient cat5e cables to pull a few fiber uplinks between the rooms that actually need the bandwidth and use switches with 10G uplinks there for distribution.
Usually a homelab is located in a single room though, so the cables in the wall don't matter anyways - go for 10Gbit over fiber there. 10Gbase-T is *horribly* inefficient, power hungry and much more expensive; X520 based nics are well supported and dirt cheap nowadays, transceivers are dirt cheap (fs.com), fiber cabling is dirt cheap (fs.com) - there's no reason any more to use copper when considering network upgrades.


lostinthesupermarket said:
Do not and will not go with 10Gbit Nics as they are rumored to be incompatible with Soho ISP Gateway hardware
Click to expand...
What do those CPEs have to do with what you are using in your homelab? (and I hope you are not using/referring to a plastic router here...)
Also - the CPE/termination (or max bandwidth) of your ISP doesn't dictate what you are using in your home network, *especially* not the PON termination which is completely unrelated to the NICs, switches etc.. in your homelab...


just FTR:
FreeBSD 14 will *very* likely see some major breakage with the transition to OpenSSL 3 - its the development branch for a reason, so don't use it for anything you really rely on.
 
Thanks for the contributions.

1) I have not seen a $30 10GBE nic card anywhere in Canada.
2) I agree that it seems counter productive to come up with a slower standard but there are were many compelling reasons that the working groups / task forces did introduce something more cost effective. I think it was driven my thermal considerations with 10GB copper.
3) I never really thought about 100% optical and avoiding copper completely.
4) I should likely stop living on the edge with 14 and go back to 13-stable.

So given that I will be stuck with my new ISP installing an indoor unit with that only a 10GE port on it, what should I use as my customer owned piece of equipment facing it?

Did I mention the 2 goals...
1) Upgrade to symmetric speeds to the internet at roughly 2Gbps with consistent low latency and low packetloss.
2) Rock solid TrueNas Core (FreeBSD) on the LAN with new improved speeds of 2 to 10 Gbps with SSD write caches on my ZFS pools.
 
lostinthesupermarket said:
So given that I will be stuck with my new ISP installing an indoor unit with that only a 10GE port on it, what should I use as my customer owned piece of equipment facing it?
Click to expand...
Since the equipment is 'Customer owned', I'd just install whatever the customer is willing to pay for.

I'd angle for the nicest, most reliable thing that your budget allows, and don't worry too much about throughput - as long as you don't create too much of a very noticeable bottleneck in your stack.
 
Interesting to note that Netgate 4100 and 6100 have plenty of 2.5 GBE ports. I guess they implemented the Intel i225 chipset under FreeBSD properly. Also seems, like there is plenty of demand for 2.5GBE or maybe some of you folks don't take Netgate seriously.
 
WTF is a "Netgate"? Seriously though, that's off-topic here. See:
forums.FreeBSD.org

GhostBSD, pfSense, TrueNAS, and all other FreeBSD Derivatives

Questions about 'derivative FreeBSDs', like GhostBSD DesktopBSD TrueNAS XigmaNAS OPNsense pfSense PacBSD BSD Router Project NomadBSD helloSystem should be asked on the forums and/or mailing lists for these specific products. See below for links. If you still think your questions should be...
forums.FreeBSD.org forums.FreeBSD.org
 
Jose said:
WTF is a "Netgate"? Seriously though, that's off-topic here. See:
forums.FreeBSD.org

GhostBSD, pfSense, TrueNAS, and all other FreeBSD Derivatives

Questions about 'derivative FreeBSDs', like GhostBSD DesktopBSD TrueNAS XigmaNAS OPNsense pfSense PacBSD BSD Router Project NomadBSD helloSystem should be asked on the forums and/or mailing lists for these specific products. See below for links. If you still think your questions should be...
forums.FreeBSD.org forums.FreeBSD.org
Click to expand...

Netgate routers are pfsense routers. Wake up. Sorry to be so blunt. But you did say "WTF". So what is that acronym.
 
Hardware would be supported, IF you run plain FreeBSD on it. PfSense is not supported here. At all.

-CURRENT is also not supported here. Join the mailing lists for that. This is a user support forum, there are very few developers here.

forums.freebsd.org

Topics about unsupported FreeBSD versions

The FreeBSD Forums cater primarily to end-users and systems administrators. As such, the Forums focus almost exclusively on FreeBSD versions that are officially supported according to the official FreeBSD website. Since resources are scarce, the FreeBSD Forums strongly suggest that anyone asking...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Thanks SirDice. That is very helpful. Sounds like pfSense is a fork of FreeBSD any maybe TrueNas is too.

If that is the case then correct me if I am wrong.

I still like the incredible stability and security of FreeBSD. I am not a Unix purist. But there is a good argument for an OS that just works. Microsoft being the last on the list.
 
lostinthesupermarket said:
Sounds like pfSense is a fork of FreeBSD any maybe TrueNas is too.
Click to expand...
They are considered derivatives and have their own development cycles. And yes, they have their own patches and changes. They're not maintained by FreeBSD developers, they are individual, and separate, projects.
 
Jose said:
WTF is a "Netgate"? Seriously though, that's off-topic here. See:
forums.FreeBSD.org

GhostBSD, pfSense, TrueNAS, and all other FreeBSD Derivatives

Questions about 'derivative FreeBSDs', like GhostBSD DesktopBSD TrueNAS XigmaNAS OPNsense pfSense PacBSD BSD Router Project NomadBSD helloSystem should be asked on the forums and/or mailing lists for these specific products. See below for links. If you still think your questions should be...
forums.FreeBSD.org forums.FreeBSD.org
Click to expand...
Netgate is a brand of routers that have pfSense as their firmware: https://www.netgate.com
 
BTW, I did get the RealTek 2.5GB cards working after a late night delivery from Amazon.

Contrary to PhishFry's guidance and nonsense about 10Gbit.

iperf3 is showing 2.35 Gbits.

But I used pfSense 23.05-RELEASE and a Linux client for the test.
 
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