Issues with NICs

[JoSSte]

I recently bought a used Fujitsu S920 with 8 GB ram and unfortunately only a singe build in NIC, in order to set up a low-budget firewall.  I upgraded the 8GB msata drive to a 64gb one, and set up a test with a USB NIC which looked promising , apart from a horrible throughput of only 5Mbit/s...

Test setup
During my test I used the following setup:
* re0 built in Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 as WAN
* ue0 USB NIC as the LAN interface
* WAN connected to my 192.168.1.0/24 home network

Purchasing adapter
I wanted to get a StarTech.com Mini PCIe Card ST1000SMPEX card, but had some issues sourcing that, so I found a Digitus DN-10134 which also pops up in opnsense as a RTL8111 card.
I also got a Lenovo 4X90S91830 USB3 gigabit NIC so I had something to test with...

Failures
I installed the miniPCIe card with the dual ports, partially worrying that the two ports would be hard to tell apart, but that was not my issue - they appeared as re1 and re2, and very conveniently were in numerical order when viewed from the back.

Config 0:
I reinstalled OPNsense afresh to avoid issues due to my experiments with the slow USB adapter.
I used re0 as the WAN as in my test, and re1 for LAN, connecting it to a known working network jack in a laptop, with all other network interfaces disabled. The PC was running Linux Mint DE and worked when plugged directly into my home network, but when I plugged it into the LAN port, it got no IP and even If I set the IP manually to 192.168.1.2 and pinged 192.168.1.1 I only got sporadical results in the form of timeouts...
I tried reinstalling a couple of times with this config, and gave up on it. Sometiimes a pc plugged in would get an IP assigned, but the web GUI would time out.

Config 1:
I reinstalled OPNsense again.
LAN set to use 10.0.0.0/16
WAN IP set to 192.168.1.160
I switched everything around, using re2 as the WAN, and re0 for LAN. now I got an IP address when connected. But I could not ping any of my servers on my LAN. I have one set up with iperf3 running as a daemon for simple throughput tests, and it was as if it did not exist to the Fujitsu OPNsense machine. I had two PCs on the 192.168.1.0/24 net which could tracepath and ping each other, but they could not see the OPNsense interface using ping or tracepath/traceroute...


Config 2:
I reinstalled OPNsense again.
LAN set to use 10.0.0.0/16
WAN IP set to 192.168.1.160
I plugged in the Lenovo USB3 Network dongle (ue0) and set it up as LAN, set up the built in NIC as WAN, and reinstalled a couple of times.

Now I can use iperf from behing the OPNsense box and get a 1Gbit/s throughput, but I would prefer to have a  built in NIC and not the USB3.0 dongle..

My question
I have no experience with mini-pcie, but when I can see the interfaces in the OS and BIOS, it does not make sense to me that they don't just work. Can I have missed something, or is the big issue that the RTL is a bad choice - or am I facing a bad adapter?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Anything from Realtek is a bad choice.

[doktornotor]

Also, don't buy Realtek. And - last but not least - don't touch any products with crapb in logo. 

[JoSSte]

Also, don't buy Realtek. And - last but not least - don't touch any products with crapb in logo. 

I had to think about that one - until I opened the case and saw the RTL chips....

[JoSSte]

so returning that crab and getting an intel i210 base card is a better choice?

[doktornotor]

Well, to be fair, crab in logo should still be better than USB NIC. 

[JoSSte]

It wasn't

[Seattle2k]

My Realtek NICs have been working great for the past 2 months. Make sure the os-realtek-re plugin/package is installed.