Installing PFSense 2.1 DEV on DELL Hardware

January 22, 2012 Andrei Rachita Linux, Networking 1

Here are some considerations when installing PFSense 2.1 DEV on DELL Hardware:

– use a plain USB Keyboard or a PS/2 keyboard when installing PFSense, otherwise your installation may fail at 38% of the process

– Some Dell machines (like some R PowerEdge servers and some Dell Optiplex machines) have Broadcom BCM5787 chip used for the on-board NIC. In this case you will get the following behavior: the NIC will detect the network cable and the network connectivity, will be able to be successfully detected when assigning interfaces, but will not be able to make any traffic on the network.

In order to solve the Broadcom BCM5787 issue, here is what you should do:

– from the console change directory to /root:

– edit the file /boot/loader.conf and add (using VI) the following line: hw.pci.enable_msi=”0″

– create a file named /boot/loader.conf.local and insert the following line: hw.pci.enable_msi=”0″

– reboot PFSense

 

1 Comment

  1. I got an Acer easyStore H340 NAS box which has the Marvell Yukon 88E8071 gigabit network adapter. I run FreeNAS 8 (which bases on FreeBSD, thats why I’m here) on it. The network interface gets detected by the correct driver and it works. Until I copy something from my PC to the NAS. For some (varying) seconds, I get transfer rates of ~50MB/s and then suddenly copying stops because the network connection is lost.

    I attached display and keyboard to the easyStore and did ifconfig msk0 down && ifconfig msk0 up then the connection was back up again. I already tried adding -rxcsum to the interface options like was suggested for the old Marvell drivers for FreeBSD 7.

    I also added the following lines to /etc/loader.conf:

    Code:
    hw.nfe.msi_disable = “1”
    hw.nfe.msix_disable = “1”
    hw.pci.enable_msix=0
    hw.pci.enable_msi=0

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