NIC not detected by FreeNAS

[mjc4wilton]

Hi, so I am deploying a FreeNAS server at my school for A/V reasons and we are having issues with FreeNAS not being able to grab an IP from the NIC. The bios detects it fine and everything. I am thinking that I need to manually install the driver for it. The NIC is a HP NC375i Quad-port NIC (so we can do aggregation(and we also have two of them for 8Gb/s)) on a HP ML370 (G6) server. We are using the latest version of FreeNAS (9.10.2-U1) FreeNAS boots up all nicely but at the end does not give us an IP address or an error saying it cannot retrieve an IP address from our DNS servers. The networking is phisically good. we have four cables running from the NIC to a switch that our studio's BlackMagic ATEM video production gear is on along with our computers. I dont want to go out and get a new NIC because they are ungodly expensive and considering we have two 4-port nics that support aggregation, we'd like that a lot.

TL;DR - I need help installing the driver for a NIC (an HP NC375i) onto FreeNAS

[ARikozuM]

Your NIC may not be compatible with FreeNAS. It was an issue on a few non-Intel NICs that I had. It's what drove me to use UnRAID.

[NTDaws]

Might not be compatible.

[Eniqmatic]

So have you tried setting it statically instead?

[Mikensan]

Does it show up when you do an ifconfig in shell? Or do you see it as an option when you go to networking > interfaces > add?

[mjc4wilton]

+Mikensan Not too sure, gives me a garbled mess of stuff thats not organized in any way possible. Seems like a bunch of hashes to me but no IP's

[Mikensan]

able to copy/paste it? Ifconfig shouldn't be all that garbled.

 

When you go to add an interface in the web interface, does it show em0/em1?

[mjc4wilton]

+Mikensan I'll give you some screenshots later. And it doesn't show anything in the web interface because it doesn't exist. It can't access the network to have an IP slapped to it to open the interface. It's not detecting WAN even.

[Mikensan]

On 1/27/2017 at 4:30 PM, mjc4wilton said:

+Mikensan I'll give you some screenshots later. And it doesn't show anything in the web interface because it doesn't exist. It can't access the network to have an IP slapped to it to open the interface. It's not detecting WAN even.

oh I see, for some reason I misunderstood. Does the server have a nic on the motherboard you can use?

[mjc4wilton]

+Mikensan we've tried that, no luck. Its only designed for ILo2 which means it was a silly idea to start with but just to make sure its useless...

[Mikensan]

Are you using an HBA card / plugging the drives directly into the motherboard? If using a HBA card then you could try installing ESXI which may support that NIC, then install FreeNAS and pass the HBA card (assuming your processor supports VT-d). That way you don't have to mess around with installing drivers into FreeNAS. FreeNAS does support vmware's emulated NICs.

 

As I understand it, and I could be wrong - but if you wanted to make changes to the kernel and such in FreeNAS, you would have to do so to the source and recompile. Believe this would include adding drivers.