Solved [Solved] DHCP not starting automatically

F

free-and-bsd

Hi, everyone.

I just upgraded my motherboard, so now my NIC (there are two of them) is Realtek Gbe (GA-Z77N-wifi mb). It didn't work with the FreeBSD kernel re driver (the interface shows up, reports the link "active" and then can't obtain a DHCP configuration), so I installed the Realtek driver from Realtek site and the NIC is fully functional now.

Except that the system behaves weird now! After all the boot message about networking interfaces found (lo0, re0, re1), there is a considerable stop and then this shows up:
Code: 
Starting Network: re0.
re0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=1b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
        ether 94:de:80:69:2d:a3
        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet autoselect
        status: no carrier
filter sync'd
Starting ums0 moused.
add net fe80::: gateway ::1
add net ff02::: gateway ::1
add net ::ffff:0.0.0.0: gateway ::1
add net ::0.0.0.0: gateway ::1
Waiting 30s for the default route interface: ............
This waiting for default route results in nothing (of course), but most annoyingly, DHCP on re1 doesn't start at all. I have to start DHCP manually using #dhclient re1 every time and it works absolutely fine, no probems with the NIC.

Here is my /etc/rc.conf:
Code: 
ipv6_network_interfaces="none"
hostname="home-kostya"
ifconfig_re1="DHCP"
ipfilter_enable="YES"
ipfilter_rules="/etc/ipf.rules"
moused_enable="YES"
mouse_type="auto"
dumpdev="NO"
lpd_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
devd_enable="YES"
linux_enable="YES"
devfs_system_ruleset="system"
The first line about ipv6 was added later and didn't help at all. There was also a WiFi Intel Centrino wireless-n 2230 card installed, but I removed it as it didn't work anyway.

Still, the message above appears out of the blue and DHCP on re1 doesn't work on startup, as configured. What could it be?

PS: the Realtek driver was installed following the README from the package: kernel reconfigured --> re removed --> recompiled without re --> compile Realtek's if_re.ko module --> install the module & and add if_re.ko to /boot/loader.conf.
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

What version and architecture of FreeBSD?
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

The last 9.2-RELEASE, amd64. A fresh install of about two months ago (no more).
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

Looking at the Realtek site I see that the driver is for 7 and 8.0, so I'm not surprised it's rather unstable on 9.2. Have you tried upgrading to 9-STABLE? They may have already added support for this variation.
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

How exactly do I upgrade to 9-STABLE? That would be interesting in any case. My experience with FreeBSD's Realtek re driver isn't convincing.

BTW, the Realtek driver is more stable regarding functionality than the native one. It works fine! It does what you want with the dhclient <iface> command, only it doesn't work with automatic DHCP settings for some reasons. Nor with service netif restart -- I tried that as well.
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

OK, upgrading to 9-STABLE did solve it. It was also good to do it for once -- it didn't take a long time either, what with an Intel Pentium G2030, 16G 16 GB RAM and the -j4 option to buildworld.

BTW: do you think -j4 is good enough, or perhaps -j5 could be used?

But then again, it is always good to know WHY things go this way or another. Why would the boot process stop at "starting moused" and wait for some 30 seconds? Those startup scripts don't return much info.

Anyway, thanks for the good hint, I didn't really hope very much it would help, but it did :). Thanks to the developers, because this mobo motherboard is a good miniATX mobo Mini ATX motherboard and I spent a lot of effort to install it all in place into an old HP Pavillion Slimline and make all the gimmicks work.
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

The only serious way to compare speeds with different numbers of jobs is to benchmark it. After benchmarking, I use -j8 on Core 2 and i3/i5 hardware.

30-second pauses are almost always DNS timeouts.
 
Re: DHCP not starting automatically

Thanks a lot.

And regarding those 16 GB of RAM: yes, I've noticed it doesn't make that much difference for overall system performance. In fact, the "minimalistic" system I've built (bare Openbox + Firefox + PCmanFM + urxvt + Mplayer etc.) would be well off with even 3 GB of RAM, but there are other systems using ZFS on this HDD, so I thought it won't hurt. Then there are tasks where extra RAM can be useful, like this buildworld process. I did as @wblock elsewhere suggests, mounting tmpfs on /usr/obj. So I thought it would be good to have some extra RAM for some funny tasks.

Thanks to everyone, we can mark this as [SOLVED].
 
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