CPU/Mobo Realtek Card issues with FreeNAS and NAS4Free

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sureshskr

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I recently bought a SOC Motherboard ASRock QC5000-ITX/PH which is based on Realtek RTL8111E Chipset for LAN. I bought this Motherboard which consumes less power to run as NAS.

Initially, I was able to do a network boot from WDS and install Windows without any issues. And file transfer reached almost 800 Mbps where the NIC supports 1 Gbps.

But, running latest version of FreeNAS, NAS4Free is an nightmare it was unable to get the IP Address from my DHCP and if I set manually also it doesn't connects. Sometimes, deleting the interfaces make the NIC works.

NIC is detected by NAS software, not sure what could be the issue.

'xpenology' NAS software doesn't had any issue working very fine.
 
Are your sure your router is in DHCP mode?
There does not seem to be any compability issue with FreeNAS and you NIC chip which is realtek 8111E. May be try a couple previous version of FreeNAS, change the usb pen drive.
You can also look at investing in a Intel NIC. those are considered vastly superior to realtek in terms of performace and are most widely supported
 
Getting anything except an intel NIC is going to be fairly tough on FreeNAS/ Nas4free. I highly suggest getting a intel NIC if your serious about FreeNAS.

/OT - I hope your using ECC ram. Else, be fairly willing to loose all your data (unrecoverable i might add)
 
odd, I used NAS4Free for a long time on a realtek NIC with no glitches

Just FYI - While NAS4Free/FreeNAS are fun to play with, they are a maintenance nightmare otherwise
The Solaris implementation on both is very sensitive to bad shutdowns (no failsafes given it is meant to be used in a production server environment) so you need to make sure its on a good UPS
Even with a good UPS and a generator backup, i had a couple of OS corruption instances in the 1 odd year I used it (Just because the Power wire got moved and a little and got loose during spring cleaning) - Fixing it back took a few unnecessary hours

Also, it does not play well with file systems other than ZFS - When I eventually got tired of NAS4Free, i moved back to a regular Debian based fileserver - Moving the files off the 3 odd TB+ ZFS HDDs I had into ext4 was a nightmare to say the least

What I would suggest it is that if you intend to use this NAS setup in a home environment, all of your needs will be fulfilled Linux based file server rather than a Solaris based one
More flexibility + better hardware support as well
 
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Many people have reported no problems with RTL8111E. So your NIC is supported in FreeNAS and no need to load the drivers and compile Freenas again. I would advice to get a couple of old versions of FreeNAS, make a bootable USB on a new USB drive and try again
 
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