I have an Epia EN15000 mainboard. Very most of the
time, I get no network connection. In fact, I've seen
FreeNAS working only once. (Which indicates that there
is no fundamental incompatibility, but something very
unstable.) Normally, it doesn't respond to a ping.
On boot, I get the following messages, which may give
a clue (to read it, I was taking pictures of the boot
process with a digicam, it scrolls away too fast):
vge0: <VIA Networking="" Gigabit=""> port 0xf800-0xf8ff mem
0xfdffe000-0xfdffe0ff irq 18 at device 14.0 on pci0
vge0: MII read timeout
vge0: failed to start MII autopoll
vge0: MII without any phy!
device_attach: vge0 attach returned 6
At the end of the boot, FreeNAS itself says:
Configuring LAN interface... done
Here it seems happy, but it doesn't work.
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Forgot to mention: my one-time success was with v0.65 (but
I could not reproduce it), the error message was now taken
from v0.66.
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It's a FreeBSD driver problem.
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Does that mean tough luck, I can't use FreeNAS?
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Did you have still this problem with the 0.68 or with the 0.682b release ?
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I had to abandon FreeNAS because of this showstopper. Meanwhile I use Slax (after trying many Linux live distros) and am quite happy with it.
But I'll do my best to re-test and report here, on my next downtime, perhaps in a few days.
Thanks for dealing with it, however!