XigmaNAS

Hello everybody,

I just started to learn about NAS4Free and now I gave it a try. I used an old computer and was amazed how easy the set-up was. As I plan to only use the NAS for backup purposes I want to use WOL and a script which monitors the traffic and automatically shuts the pc down.
So far I got it to work using the NAS4Free-x86-LiveUSB-9.1.0.1.847 software and a script from http://n4f.siftusystems.com/index.php/2 ... ff-script/.

The PC's mainboard is an Asus A7N8X-E (http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/soc ... deluxe.pdf). It has two LAN-connectors but only one that supports Gigabit LAN. The one supporting only 100 Mbit can be used for WOL purposes just fine, but the Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN seems to have some problems. Using Windows XP I was able to use WOL on both LAN devices but with NAS4Free I don't see the WOL option in the Control Panel for the Marvell LAN device. I guess that the driver is having some troubles because after installing the live version of NAS4Free I am even unable to use the Marvell device at all.
As I need to transfer several Gigabyte of Data the extra speed would be appreciated.
So I want to know if there is a way to get the Marvell device working by maybe manually adding a driver. Sadly I am quite unexperienced with FreeBSD and so I don't have a clou. On the marvel website I found drivers vor my device for FreeBSD though.

If it isn't possible to get the device to work maybe someone could suggest me a gigabit pci card which is supported by NAS4Free.


Thanks in advance for any help!

Intel cards are generally well supported by free BSD.
Just keep in mind that if you want to saturate a gigabit connection, you would need a PCI express card, not a simple PCI...

Thanks for the quick reply. As far as I know even though the Marvel Gigabit LAN is onbord it is internally also connected via pci and as the mainboard doesn't have a pci express card I don't have an alternative here. But maybe the pci gigabit card is anyway faster than the 100 Mbit card.
However I would of course prefer to get the existing card working. It seems that others also have problems with Marvell LAN devices.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free ... 50300.html
https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=159
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/c ... 00246.html

As a new Gigabyte pci card doesn't seem to help me much maybe I should opt for a whole new hardware setup. Or I will try to life with the 100 Mbit device.

As far as i read marwell works fine at 1GB , only WOL do not work

You were right, I got the Marvell Card to work. Only WOL won't work.
But sadly as I do file transfers I only get speeds of up to 3 MB/s with the 100 Mbit card and also I keep getting Kernel panics every once in a while during file transfers. So I think that maybe there is some faulty hardware. I already changed the graphic card and the RAM modules. So maybe there are some problems with the Mainboard's SATA controller (Silicon Image). Although with Windows XP everything seemed to work just fine.

So as I run out of time I might simply buy a new external harddrive and do the backups manually. Many thanks though.