Selfhosted
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Realtek NICs are known to be kinda incompatible with PFSense (some features won't work). But supposedly they work just fine with OPNSense. Maybe the NIC is just faulty? I haven't personally used OPNSense, so I can't really say for sure.
But if your friend wants to run PFSense, he needs an Intel NIC, period. I'd argue that most people probably don't need 4 ports, they just need to add a decent 2.5G switch if they want more ports. But your friend might know better if he has a specific use case that requires a 4 port NIC.
Realtek NICs just never seem to work well with any Unix-like variants. I've never had good luck with them in Linux, which has far better/wider hardware support than FreeBSD does.
Realtek are a problem with FreeBSD in general, so Opnsense has issues with them as well.
If you're using any FreeBSD-based OS you should manually compile the realtek-re-kmod port. Make sure your kernel source is in sync with what you're running.
On a router, I'd rather spend $40 on a NIC that doesn't pile up every kernel update. In the early days of Linux, I'd always keep a NE2000 in servers as a backdoor network connection for any system that had a compiled driver for a faster card.
Yeah it's a pain in the arse. I 100% recommend Broadcom or Intel NICs for a router. I have a fileserver which has several Intel NICs and a single Realtek one and the latter is a PITA.
Got any examples of what the problems are? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue.
I did quite a bit of research before buying one of those generic Chinese N95 router boxes recently, and I ultimately settled on an Intel NIC just to have options (I want to try both OPNSense and PFSense). But all the reviews I found said that the options with Realtek NICs had problems with PFSense (bandwidth and VLANs not working) but functioned perfectly fine with OPNSense.
Maybe there are some poor quality Realtek NICs that should be avoided, but others are fine? Might be helpful to document that so the community is aware....
Anecdotal, but I was guiding a friend through setting OS up and it just wouldn't happen with an RTL8169. Swapped in an Intel, away it went. So that's a sample set of 1, take it for what it's worth. But realtek have been a pain in my ass for decades, it really didn't surprise me.
He wants to try to use opnsense due to the problems with netgate.
Fair. I've been considering OPNSense myself, but I bought an Intel NIC just so that I know I have the option of using either. Also, the nerds here generally agree that they're higher quality than Realtek.