Hardware

What I don't understand is why a single realtek nic works flawless, while a USB2.0 card does not... They don't get the same IRQ then. I thought this was controlled by the bios. But wait - I think I have seen some PCI nic's with jumpers to set IRQ? Makes more sense - the PCI card have a default IRQ setting - unless set in bios.

Have you tried Linux on this box? Same problem?

About NAS - couldn't the IDE port be used? I guess it could be a problem with larger disks though... A diskcontroller card may be a solution, with some IRQ luck

My boxes arrives someday this week - can't wait to fire them up!

hi, the moment i installed the usb v2.0 pci adapter it gets the same irq as the onboad realtek nic... irq sharing no go, box hangs. the same as i had with the dual port nics. 

no, i didn't try linux yet since freenas is working for weeks now with the external 400gb usb hdd on the onboard usb 1.x connector. not very fast but fast enough for music and video streaming. i use the freenas as storage for my dreamboxes to record and play movies. and to play about 200gb of ogg music files on my computers.

the bios of these boxes don't allow you to disable the onboard realtek nic.  since if that was possible then a 4 port pci adapter could do the job.

What I don't understand is why a single realtek nic works flawless, while a USB2.0 card does not... They don't get the same IRQ then.

if the chip set and the irq is the same (realtek 8039) then you don't have a problem. but till now i didn't find a dual port pci nic with a realtek chip set...

Hi
I've succeded in making this boxes work w/ the dual sis card (Soekris Engineering lan1621) w/o any issue.
I've one of those boxes (128MB ram, 32MB DOM) in a customer site since a lot of time.
The machine is working fine since 3 months.

k

@krazyk,

thanks for your valuable message!  i was thinking about those cards from soekris but they are about $68 and i didn't want to gamble but now i know i need one of those cards! 

can you please tell us what you did to make this card working in the neoware? did you needed to tweak the bios settings? like disable sound, serial ports etc.

what image did you use? the PC version or Soekris?

Thanks again,

bt

Nothing special. I've just disable the PnP OS setting it the bios.
Furthermore I've a great news for you. I too got the necessity to use a dual intel (fxp, not dc) card. The only way to success is to loose the realtek one (just change the JLAN jumper, close to the memory socket, from 1-2 to 2-3). Ok now I've just a 2 port firewalll but that's more what I need. I've no clue why the BIOS of the neoware (just for further reference the IGEL WinNet III is _exactly_ the same machine) will made share the IRQ between fxp and rl. Unfortunately I had no time to test the POLLING options, as by using pooling, you should fix also the issue intel/realtek.
I tried also w/ a 4 port  dc card. It seemed to work, as the IRQ was different (15), but I'd to discard as the adaptec one is too long!.
As regards the image I used the PC version. I think the Soekris one can work, but for sure you need to force the output to serail console (ie: create a boot.config in the root fo the CF w/ the following content: "-h" ).
Hope I was useful (sorry for the very long dealy, but I usually don't follow so much the forum), net time wake me up w/ a PM

Thank you for sharing your knowledge/experience

Wonderful, will try again with my fxp card tonight. Also, it's easy to get the fxp on a IRQ 15 - if I remember correctly there's a setting where you can choose "even" or "level" (I will correct this when I get home). I believe what you mean is that the graphic chip in the box uses IRQ 15 as well, and have to be disabled, only using a serial port for monitor?

What's "polling" or "pooling"?

ehm pooling is just a typo error
polling is a way to query the card (not all cards) w/o using IRQ's (cfr http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=polling&sektion=4&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+4.11-RELEASE )
My VGA does not get any IRQ. The 4 port DC card got IRQ15, that usually is reserved to 2nd IDE channel.
In deed I must admit, that for my convenience I used the PC image w/ a small trick: a boot.config file on the root of the CF w/ the following content: -P -D. This way I can get console both on serial and VGA.

@ krazyk,

thanks again for all your work and help! 

will try to get things going with this box again since the electric bill is high and any box i can make smaller the better. 

bt

Hi,

Just read a post saying you were going to try getting M0n0 to work on a neostation eon 3000, did you ever get it going?

Thanks a lot,

Radial.

hi,

well it works fine but only with an extra realtek pci card in the pci slot.

i tried a whole bunch of dual nic cards like compaq / dell / intel / dec but this wasn't successful. so as a 2 port firewall is't working fine but i need a 3 port firewall (wan/dmz/lan). so the neoware box is doing nothing at the moment.

i found the soekris dual port nic to expensive (p&p usa -> uk 60$!) and build a m0n0wall 3 port firewall with a compaq mini deskpro box and thats working fine with a intel dual port nic and the onboard nic.

this whole issue has to do with freebsd and shared IRQ...

cheers,
bt

Hey there, i have the neostation 3000 my self and could never install m0n0wall on it because of the lack of support for disk on chip (DOC) in the kernel (FLA drivers)
did anyone find a way to include the drivers and install?

i just used a cf (compact flash) card on the ide connector. that was working fine. well still is since one of my neoware boxes is a freenas system. 

Yeah, I also use CF. One one box I've also used a 2.5" HDD and CD-ROM, works very well.

Damn Small Linux (DSL) works well - but  the IRQ issues are still there - so I believe this is OS independent, and not a BSD issue. The hardware was simply not designed to have advanced hardware addons...

[$9.00]

I wanted to take a minute to thank all of you for an extremely informative thread. After being inspired by this discussion I purchased a Neoware 3000 on eBay for $9.00 + shipping. Another $10.00 on newegg got me an IDE to CF converter. After playing around with the configuration for a while I now have a fully functional fanless m0n0wall appliance for the ridiculously low price of $39.00 (including shipping)

Not sure if this will help anyone, but the 3Com 3C990-TX NIC works fine with m0n0 1.3b4.

The only question I have is what the cpu throttling setting in the BIOS should be set to. My Neoware box appears to bog down under heavy Internet traffic (>5Mbps downloads) no matter what I do. There are so few cpu resources available that the traffic and/or cpu graphs stop functioning when the GUI is open. This seems to happen no matter what NIC I use (I originally had a Realtek installed).

Thanks again for all of the information. My company has several remote employees, and I'm kicking around the idea of buying a caselot of these little Neoware boxes to build m0n0 appliances for them.


Chris

your welcome.

to be honest i never changed that bios value. so i’m not really any help with that.

at the moment i don't use a neoware box as m0n0wall any more since i needed more nic’s (networks). i use a old compaq piii small form factor now. but the other neoware i use it as a freenas box with an 400gb external usb disc.