Steve Glaus wrote:
I bought a Realtek based 4 port pci 10/110 card off of ebay.
I was hoping I would be able to use this card to set-up for individual
networks. When I boot the card in openbsd it only comes up with one
(ral0) interface. Is it possible this is just a 'switching' card and I
cant route traffic across the ports?
It has a realtek RTL8305SC controller chip on it - which according to
what I've read has 5 MAC's - Maybe I'm not understanding what this card
is supposed to do correctly.
I'm gonna guess I know what you have, unfortunately, your description
is horribly incomplete.
These things are great...IF you know what they are, and how they work.
I bought one of these things because I didn't believe it was how it
was advertised. I really need to quit doing that, spending money to
find out HOW I'm getting scammed is kinda sick. :)
It's a single port NIC with a five-port switch on it. One port is
attached to the card directly. The ports on the ones I have seen are
all auto-detecting, no cross-over cables needed. That makes these
cards darned useful for some applications.
BUT, not if you were expecting a four-port NIC.
Shouldn't OpenBSD provide four ral interfaces when you boot with this
card? Is there something I need to change to get openbsd to recognize
the additional ports.
as already mentioned, not ral(4), and OpenBSD will do the right thing
with this card. It may not be what YOU thought was right, however. :)
I've read that there may be problems with 'older' computers. I have this
in a PIII - perhaps that would qualify as 'older' ?
not in my book. :)
(not in the manufacturer's, either).
WHY do they call it a "router card"? Well, add the card to your
(windows) computer which has an EXISTING NIC, install their "routing"
software, ta-da, you have just turned your $1000 computer into a $30
router...'cept it is vulnerable to every Windows virus. You didn't
see that part about "existing NIC" did you? :)
One gotcha with these cards: as the NIC is directly attached to a
switch, it always shows link, even if no other device is attached to
the switch.
There are lots of really cool things you can do with these cards, but
they most certainly are not four-port NICs.
Nick.
