Ethernet not working

[Haku]

I've just finished putting together a NAS box consisting of these new parts:

Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Case
Gigabyte GA-E350N E-350D A45 FCH VGA HDMI 7.1 Channel Audio mITX Motherboard
Kingston 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz HyperX Blu Memory Kit CL9 1.65V
4x WD 3TB Green drives (head parking turned off with wdidle3.exe)
Magna ATX-500W PSU

All works fine (uses less than 60w when idling which is nice) and so I put FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64.img on a 4GB USB stick and booted the NAS from it, followed the online instructions for setting the static IP address/mask/gateway but it can't connect to any other machine on my network, nor those machines to it, not even pinging works from the box as it throws up the error "ping: sendto: Host is down".
I also tried NAS4Free and had exactly the same issue of no connectivity.

I know the network cable & motherboard work fine because I tried installing Windows on a hd with the necessary drivers and could browse webpages etc. without a problem.

Have to admit I'm stumped, does anyone what the issue could be?

 

[cyberjock]

I can think of 2 possibilities:

1. The NIC you are using isn't online. That is to say the network card isn't supported, your network cable isn't plugged in all the way, or the network card is broken. I'll assume you didn't deliberately disable it because you'd have known you did that.
2. Try using your DHCP server on your network. Somewhere your static IP address/mask/gateway must be wrong.

 

[Haku]

Thanks for your suggestions, I dug an old 10/100 PCI network card out of my PC parts collection and plugged it in, disabled the onboard LAN in the BIOS and booted up to find that after setting IP address/netmask there's no problems. So in conclusion:

The onboard 10/100/1000 LAN of the Gigabyte GA-E350N motherboard isn't compatable with FreeNAS & NAS4Free.

The old 3Com EtherLink 10/100 (3C905-TX) PCI card works fine.


Now I can't be stuck with a 100mbit link on this NAS so can anyone reccomend a gigabit PCI card that works with FreeNAS?

 

[gpsguy]

Intel Pro/1000's are great. They cost about $30 USD for an OEM desktop version.

 

[cyberjock]

Intel Pro/1000's are great. They cost about $30 USD for an OEM desktop version.

That's the best you're gonna get, especially for that price!