P5K-SE on-board NIC not working - Freenas 8.04

[shan81]

Hi Everybody,

I've got a P5K-SE mainboard that I've setup with Freenas 8.04, but the onboard NIC isn't working properly.

It appears to be supported under FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.0R/hardware.html

"The age(4) driver provides support for LOMs based on Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet controller chips, including - ASUS P5K-SE"

The NIC is detected by Freenas and obtains an IP address from my local DHCP server but, I'm unable to ping the Freenas box or login via HTTP.

I have one more problem with this board as well. When I enter the BIOS and select 'boot-device priorities', my USB stick but it isn't listed as a choice, so I selected "Removable Device" as the first boot device. When the computer go through it's boot procedure, it wont boot the USB drive. The strange part is though, if I choose my boot device via the boot menu (F8 button) I can select the USB-drive and boot off it with no issues.

Any help with these problems would be appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[shan81]

Hi Everybody,

The on-board NIC problem has been temporary fixed. I did this by installing another supported NIC card and disabling the on-board NIC.

I've fixed the boot-device problem too. The USB stick is listed as a hard-drive and needs to be selected before it's displayed as a drive, under 'boot device priorities'.

I'd still like some advise regarding the on-board NIC if anybody has any.

Thanks.

 

[praecorloth]

Alright, so my experience with Atheros NICs not working is in Linux, but you may be running in to a similar problem. Basically I had installed a motherboard that had an Atheros NIC onboard, just like yours. The computer was going to run a virtual machine appliance OS called ProxMox (lovely system, by the way). Since it is based on Debian Linux, I figured it can run on basically anything I can throw at it. But apparently the Atheros NIC was not supported.

Long story short (too late), Linux does support the Atheros NIC, but only if wireless is built in to the kernel. Apparently Atheros is known or wireless cards, not so much wired ethernet, and so that's where their drivers lived. Since anyone wanting to run ProxMox likely wouldn't want to use wireless networking, it was omitted from the kernel and thus Atheros would not work.

FreeNAS is FreeBSD based, but I wonder if something similar could be happening. I don't know FreeBSD very well, but maybe someone who knows it better than me can pick up from this trail and maybe find something.