Nowadays we can not think about a computer without thinking about a network
connection. Adding and configuring a network card is a common task for any FreeBSD
administrator.
Before you begin, you should know the model of the card you have, the chip it uses,
and whether it is a PCI or ISA card. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of both PCI and ISA
cards. Check the Hardware Compatibility List for your release to see if your card is
supported.
Once you are sure your card is supported, you need to determine the proper driver for
the card. /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES and /usr/src/sys/arch/conf/NOTES
will give you the list of network interface drivers with some information about the
supported chipsets/cards. If you have doubts about which driver is the correct one, read
the manual page of the driver. The manual page will give you more information about the
supported hardware and even the possible problems that could occur.
If you own a common card, most of the time you will not have to look very hard for a
driver. Drivers for common network cards are present in the GENERIC kernel, so your card should show up during boot, like
so:
dc0: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 0xd3800000-0xd38
000ff irq 15 at device 11.0 on pci0
dc0: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:da
miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
dc1: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xd3000000-0xd30
000ff irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0
dc1: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:db
miibus1: <MII bus> on dc1
ukphy1: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus1
ukphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
In this example, we see that two cards using the dc(4) driver are
present on the system.
If the driver for your NIC is not present in GENERIC, you
will need to load the proper driver to use your NIC. This may be accomplished in one of
two ways:
The easiest way is to simply load a kernel module for your network card with kldload(8), or
automatically at boot time by adding the appropriate line to the file /boot/loader.conf. Not all NIC drivers are available as modules;
notable examples of devices for which modules do not exist are ISA cards.
Alternatively, you may statically compile the support for your card into your kernel.
Check /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES, /usr/src/sys/arch/conf/NOTES
and the manual page of the driver to know what to add in your kernel configuration file.
For more information about recompiling your kernel, please see Chapter 8. If your card was detected at boot by your kernel
(GENERIC) you do not have to build a new kernel.
Unfortunately, there are still many vendors that do not provide schematics for their
drivers to the open source community because they regard such information as trade
secrets. Consequently, the developers of FreeBSD and other operating systems are left two
choices: develop the drivers by a long and pain-staking process of reverse engineering or
using the existing driver binaries available for the Microsoft® Windows
platforms. Most developers, including those involved with FreeBSD, have taken the latter
approach.
Thanks to the contributions of Bill Paul (wpaul), as of FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE there
is “native” support for the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS).
The FreeBSD NDISulator (otherwise known as Project Evil) takes a Windows driver binary and basically tricks it into thinking it
is running on Windows. Because the ndis(4) driver is
using a Windows binary, it is only usable on i386™ and amd64 systems.
Note: The ndis(4) driver is
designed to support mainly PCI, CardBus and PCMCIA devices, USB devices are not yet
supported.
In order to use the NDISulator, you need three things:
Kernel sources
Windows XP driver binary (.SYS extension)
Windows XP driver configuration file (.INF extension)
Locate the files for your specific card. Generally, they can be found on the included
CDs or at the vendors' websites. In the following examples, we will use W32DRIVER.SYS and W32DRIVER.INF.
Note: You can not use a Windows/i386 driver with
FreeBSD/amd64, you must get a Windows/amd64 driver to make
it work properly.
The next step is to compile the driver binary into a loadable kernel module. To
accomplish this, as root, use ndisgen(8):
The ndisgen(8) utility is
interactive and will prompt for any extra information it requires; it will produce a
kernel module in the current directory which can be loaded as follows:
#kldload ./W32DRIVER.ko
In addition to the generated kernel module, you must load the ndis.ko and if_ndis.ko modules. This
should be automatically done when you load any module that depends on ndis(4). If you want
to load them manually, use the following commands:
#kldload ndis#kldload if_ndis
The first command loads the NDIS miniport driver wrapper, the second loads the actual
network interface.
Now, check dmesg(8) to see if
there were any errors loading. If all went well, you should get output resembling the
following:
ndis0: <Wireless-G PCI Adapter> mem 0xf4100000-0xf4101fff irq 3 at device 8.0 on pci1
ndis0: NDIS API version: 5.0
ndis0: Ethernet address: 0a:b1:2c:d3:4e:f5
ndis0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ndis0: 11g rates: 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
From here you can treat the ndis0 device like any other
network interface (e.g., dc0).
You can configure the system to load the NDIS modules at boot time in the same way as
with any other module. First, copy the generated module, W32DRIVER.ko, to the /boot/modules
directory. Then, add the following line to /boot/loader.conf:
Once the right driver is loaded for the network card, the card needs to be configured.
As with many other things, the network card may have been configured at installation time
by sysinstall.
To display the configuration for the network interfaces on your system, enter the
following command:
%ifconfig
dc0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
status: active
dc1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:db
media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP
status: no carrier
lp0: flags=8810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
tun0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
Note: Old versions of FreeBSD may require the -a
option following ifconfig(8), for more
details about the correct syntax of ifconfig(8), please
refer to the manual page. Note also that entries concerning IPv6 (inet6 etc.) were omitted in this example.
In this example, the following devices were displayed:
dc0: The first Ethernet interface
dc1: The second Ethernet interface
lp0: The parallel port interface
lo0: The loopback device
tun0: The tunnel device used by ppp
FreeBSD uses the driver name followed by the order in which one the card is detected
at the kernel boot to name the network card. For example sis2
would be the third network card on the system using the sis(4) driver.
In this example, the dc0 device is up and running. The key
indicators are:
UP means that the card is configured and ready.
The card has an Internet (inet) address (in this case 192.168.1.3).
It has a valid subnet mask (netmask; 0xffffff00 is the same as 255.255.255.0).
It has a valid broadcast address (in this case, 192.168.1.255).
The MAC address of the card (ether) is 00:a0:cc:da:da:da
The physical media selection is on autoselection mode (media:
Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)). We see that dc1 was configured to run with 10baseT/UTP media. For more information on available media types for
a driver, please refer to its manual page.
The status of the link (status) is active, i.e. the carrier is detected. For dc1, we see status: no carrier. This is
normal when an Ethernet cable is not plugged into the card.
If the ifconfig(8) output had
shown something similar to:
dc0: flags=8843<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da
it would indicate the card has not been configured.
To configure your card, you need root privileges. The
network card configuration can be done from the command line with ifconfig(8) but you
would have to do it after each reboot of the system. The file /etc/rc.conf is where to add the network card's configuration.
Open /etc/rc.conf in your favorite editor. You need to add a
line for each network card present on the system, for example in our case, we added these
lines:
ifconfig_dc0="inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0"
ifconfig_dc1="inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 media 10baseT/UTP"
You have to replace dc0, dc1,
and so on, with the correct device for your cards, and the addresses with the proper
ones. You should read the card driver and ifconfig(8) manual
pages for more details about the allowed options and also rc.conf(5) manual page
for more information on the syntax of /etc/rc.conf.
If you configured the network during installation, some lines about the network
card(s) may be already present. Double check /etc/rc.conf
before adding any lines.
You will also have to edit the file /etc/hosts to add the
names and the IP addresses of various machines of the LAN, if they are not already there.
For more information please refer to hosts(5) and to /usr/share/examples/etc/hosts.
Once you have made the necessary changes in /etc/rc.conf,
you should reboot your system. This will allow the change(s) to the interface(s) to be
applied, and verify that the system restarts without any configuration errors.
Once the system has been rebooted, you should test the network interfaces.
To verify that an Ethernet card is configured correctly, you have to try two things.
First, ping the interface itself, and then ping another machine on the LAN.
First test the local interface:
%ping -c5 192.168.1.3
PING 192.168.1.3 (192.168.1.3): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.082 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.074 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.076 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.108 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.076 ms
--- 192.168.1.3 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.074/0.083/0.108/0.013 ms
Now we have to ping another machine on the LAN:
%ping -c5 192.168.1.2
PING 192.168.1.2 (192.168.1.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.726 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.766 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.700 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.747 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.704 ms
--- 192.168.1.2 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.700/0.729/0.766/0.025 ms
You could also use the machine name instead of 192.168.1.2 if
you have set up the /etc/hosts file.
Troubleshooting hardware and software configurations is always a pain, and a pain
which can be alleviated by checking the simple things first. Is your network cable
plugged in? Have you properly configured the network services? Did you configure the
firewall correctly? Is the card you are using supported by FreeBSD? Always check the
hardware notes before sending off a bug report. Update your version of FreeBSD to the
latest STABLE version. Check the mailing list archives, or perhaps search the
Internet.
If the card works, yet performance is poor, it would be worthwhile to read over the tuning(7) manual page.
You can also check the network configuration as incorrect network settings can cause slow
connections.
Some users experience one or two “device
timeout” messages, which is normal for some cards. If they continue, or are
bothersome, you may wish to be sure the device is not conflicting with another device.
Double check the cable connections. Perhaps you may just need to get another card.
At times, users see a few “watchdog timeout”
errors. The first thing to do here is to check your network cable. Many cards require a
PCI slot which supports Bus Mastering. On some old motherboards, only one PCI slot allows
it (usually slot 0). Check the network card and the motherboard documentation to
determine if that may be the problem.
“No route to host” messages occur if the system
is unable to route a packet to the destination host. This can happen if no default route
is specified, or if a cable is unplugged. Check the output of netstat
-rn and make sure there is a valid route to the host you are trying to reach. If
there is not, read on to Chapter 29.
“ping: sendto: Permission denied” error
messages are often caused by a misconfigured firewall. If ipfw
is enabled in the kernel but no rules have been defined, then the default policy is to
deny all traffic, even ping requests! Read on to Chapter 28
for more information.
Sometimes performance of the card is poor, or below average. In these cases it is best
to set the media selection mode from autoselect to the correct
media selection. While this usually works for most hardware, it may not resolve this
issue for everyone. Again, check all the network settings, and read over the tuning(7) manual
page.
